![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/For-Mama2.jpg\" "\\"For")
<\/a>My mother was born July 3, in the sign of the mother — Cancer. Fiercely protective, she was singularly focused on nurturing me, my sister and a host of others in her family, her emotional life and ours were constantly on a roller coaster. Mine was a childhood full of parties, singing, and smoke-filled mah joohng games deep into the night. Her laughter was music. Her singing voice soared.<\/p>\n
She worked all the time. She and Dad had to. He made a cook’s salary of $5,000 a year. In 1960 dollars, that equaled a $20,000 in today’s numbers. She worked for thirty years in a frozen food factory about two miles from our home in Watsonville, California. Together they afforded to buy two houses, and put me and my sister through private schools and ultimately college. “We will never deny you food or a good education. The rest is on your own.”<\/p>\n
We often wonder what would have become of our mothers had they never had us. Would they have had the lives they dreamed of? I remember when I asked her those questions and her answer was her life itself. She loved being at home, being married, dancing, being with her friends and worrying obsessively about my sister and me. Yet, there was always something unfulfilled in her that when I was young, could never fathom. It wasn’t until years later that I found out she was an actress like me, and that she loved performing. Whatever platform separating us as mother and child had suddenly vanished. We had become equals on a deep creative plane. Taking a look at our charts, Uranus and Jupiter at 23 Cancer in the 5th house of family and creativity in my chart was exactly conjunct her Jupiter in the 11th in Cancer in the same degree. We met each other halfway around the wheel.<\/p>\n
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As she aged and her memories grew dim, it was our turn to obsessively worry about her. Her decline came with a series of small strokes which happened periodically over her late 60s and early 70s. She was already small when she was younger — four feet, ten inches tall when I was a kid. With age she had shrunk two inches shorter. In her old age and frailty, she became my sister’s and my child.<\/p>\n
After going through the trauma of the sudden death of my father in my youth, the anticipation of my mother’s death in my middle age was an anxiety-ridden ordeal. It caused me to go into therapy to prepare for life without her. It was the fear of her ultimate withdrawal from me that filled me with dread so severe I was willing to die before her.<\/p>\n
Through therapy, I came to that realization before she died. I was grateful our last days together were filled with peace. We let go of each other quickly and calmly. What followed was a new life. One lived well without her in it, yet not feeling I betrayed her because I continued to live.<\/p>\n
It’s amazing how often an infant changes in appearance, moving from mother to father, back and forth throughout its development. That morphing between parents does not change throughout one’s life, and right now, after over fifty years of being told I look like my father, I see in the mirror that I really look a lot like my mother.<\/p>\n
Blood, bone, chromosome. Wrinkle. cheek, jowl. I am looking at my face in the mirror of hers — remembering how she aged as I am aging now. Time and gravity have changed the roundness of my face, and the facial muscles that have been used the most — the laugh lines, the cheeks and jowls — are well-exercised and defined by the years. It’s almost as if laughter made both of our round faces square. I look at the stranger in the mirror — the one with my voice and thoughts, and I see her.<\/p>\n
Two years after Mama passed, I was deep in kundalini meditation. In session, the teacher put his hands on each and every one of us while in our sitting state. The silence of the room was graced by the small tinkling of a bell he would use to keep us mindful during our practice. When he came to me, I felt his touch and heard his voice not with my ears but with my mind. He said, “your mother is gone. She has chosen to move on and incarnate into a new life. You are free.”<\/p>\n
I wasn’t thinking about her, at least not consciously. But maybe I was. Maybe we both were thinking about each other at that moment. The relationship between Mother and child is longer than an umbilical cord and stronger than death.<\/p>\n
It is a string connecting us from the roots in the earth into the levels of pure consciousness without form. And it is a cycle. Release. Birth. Life. Release. Close or not — and my mother and I were often not that close — we were still connected. She was letting me know she moves released\u00a0 — reborn into her next phase of being, while I am here released in this one, reborn as me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A creative spirit. Demanding. Operatic. Impossible. Yet love from her was unmistakable, without equivocation, and passionately unconditional. Life as Irene’s daughter was a warm bath in complete maternal affection alternating with moments of abject loneliness and the terror of having her love withdrawn and being abandoned. When I angered her, it was either her wrath … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38068"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}