Permission Unbound

A Mother’s Day reflection on carrying, fixing, and learning to be held.

A post by Kelly Hubbell moved through our feed this week. A daughter writing about her mother — a single mom of four who carried everything silently, until her body said enough. Now a mother herself, Kelly is inviting her readers (explicitly, mothers; implicitly, all of us) to claim a different kind of gift this Mother’s Day: not just a morning off from mothering duties, but permission. Permission to ask for help. Permission to receive help. Permission to stop being everything to everyone. Permission to breathe.

We sat with it.

What Kelly names is close to what we hold at PCF / Praestolari. And not only for mothers.

Many of the women we know (mothers and not, of all generations and circumstances) have inherited the same quiet job description. Problem at work? Find a focused, rational woman to take a look. People arguing? Find a calm one to defuse it. Tasks to assign? Find an organized one. Skinned knee? Find a mother (or someone who knows how to mother) to clean it and put on a bandaid. We are, as one woman in our community put it this week, the backbone society steadies itself by. We almost never ask for help. We just do.

That is one inheritance.

There is another. Some of us are carrying wounds around motherhood… losses, absences, complicated relationships with the mothers who raised us, or the ones who didn’t – and with the children we’ve lost too young, or with whom we’ve lost contact, or those we wished to have but couldn’t or didn’t. Some of us are learning, slowly and at every age, to mother the parts of ourselves that were never tended.

For all of these, today’s invitation is the same.

A different kind of permission

Kelly is offering mothers permission to ask for help and support from others… to be sustained by people, by communities, by the kind of village that puts flesh on our interconnectedness. Not trying to do it alone helps keep us healthy enough to be present for the people we love. This is absolutely important, but is it sufficient?

What Centering Prayer offers — what it offers any of us (regardless of gender, whether or not we have children) — is a deeper kind of permission. Permission to put it all down for twenty minutes. To stop performing, trying, fixing; to make the shift to allowing and consenting.  To recognize that we (and those we love) are held by a Presence larger than the one we keep trying to be. And then to allow that Presence to continue holding us as we move through the rest of the day.

This is, as another woman in our community said this week, the truest form of rest – rest with our Creator.

And here is the quiet irony: stepping away from goals and striving often yields paradoxical fruit. We may find we have more to give, not less. The presence we keep trying to manufacture for everyone else has been near us all along, waiting for us to slow down and receive. Letting ourselves be sustained, it turns out, is what makes us most truly present for the village.

For the mothers in our Circles inside

Many of the people who sit in the Centering Prayer circles are mothers. Mothers serving long sentences. Mothers of sons and daughters who are incarcerated, who have been holding their own kind of weight for years. Mothers who learned, somewhere along the way, to hide what they needed.

It feels important to name something we have come to understand from our friends inside: many women carry a heavy amount of shame around what their incarceration has cost. The losses can feel overwhelming and unbearable. The narratives the world hands them are often narrow, and rarely tender.

We want to say, plainly: motherhood is not a credential that can be revoked by circumstance. It is a gift to share… with one’s children, with the women who become sisters and aunts and elders to one another inside, with the younger ones who arrive frightened and need someone to remind them that they are still themselves. 

The nurturing of others. The nurturing of self. Both are sacred. Neither is undone by where you sleep tonight.

A breath, before you go on

If you are reading this, take a moment.

A long, slow breath in.

A long, slow breath out.

Behold the Presence that beholds you, by whatever name lets you rest. Mother. Father. God. Source. Friend. Universe. Allow yourself to be received. Relax into the arms of a Love that has been patient and steady all along, waiting for you to stop running. Let it hold you. Let it hold the people you love, through you.

That is enough. That is the whole prayer.

Returning

Endurance is not won by gripping harder. It is sustained (and recovered) by returning, again and again, to stillness. To consent. To breath. To the steady, patient love that meets us exactly where we are.

This Mother’s Day, we honor every mother holding too much… in the visiting room, behind the wall, at the kitchen table before sunrise. We honor the mothers in our Circles inside. We honor the mothers still waiting for their children. We honor the women who are not mothers but who have done the long work of mothering anyway. We honor the women who are learning to mother themselves.

May you give yourself permission to rest, and to be still.

May you be held today, and every day, by the steadiness you have given to so many.

Happy Mother’s Day.