There comes a day when we find our reflection hurrying away from the mirror in the face of the unstoppable flow of time, a fleeting and withering vision that forces us to admit the truth: each time we look more and more like our mothers. The accordion of time bends and imposes the rhythm of nostalgia on us. The vulnerable look of the girl we still were remains, but now in that face, that hair, that body and that voice that we thought was ours, there is more of her. Echoes of the mother that echoed in the mother that I am. Now I’m the one losing control and from whose lips escape words that should never have seen the light of day; Now I’m the one doing, undoing and deciding before the helpless gaze of my daughters. But we are also the ones who caress, laugh and play, who follow and advise, feed and organize lives our creatures.

Mother’s stories

That moment of tenderness and horror when we are alone for the first time with our daughter in our arms and say to ourselves: the life of this being depends on me. Weight, joy and responsibility, privilege, challenge. We mothers look at the world with different eyes, but the world also looks at us: with admiration or sympathy, even with contempt or indifference. A society that does not protect, that does not prioritize mothers is doomed: a mother who suffers, constantly burdened by obstacles and shortcomings will not be (let’s not romanticize) a sacrificial saint; she will be a traumatized woman who will raise children marked by pain.

Children look at us. His gaze follows us as we cry and laugh; we are the glass through which they view the world. If they see us scared, they feel fear, they absorb our sadness and joy. They will go through life and one day find themselves repeating the words they heard us say, mimicking the gestures we made them feel loved and despised. All our mistakes are imprinted in their lives with indelible ink. There is forgiveness, but not forgetting.

wife and mother

human pachamama

Motherhood is a roller coaster where one day your heart explodes with joy and tenderness, and the next you are weighed down by guilt, fear of loss; It is an adventure in which we are at the top and in the abyss at the same time. But there are oases of pure and carefree joy (reclining with my daughter in both arms looking up from the soft and white bed at the moon that rules the sky), those memories that we mothers take refuge in every time life threatens to defeat us. We are inhabited by a register of smells, textures, places, words, games, songs and beautiful, funny and strange moments, moments that we pass on to our children to ensure the permanence of memories. That’s how we create and raise them, that’s how we weave the web that is most important to us in life, that connection that follows the trail of that umbilical cord that will never disappear: a connection of tenderness, shared stories and adventures, but also unresolved conflicts. pass year, and my mother is far away; the umbilical cord that connects us has too many knots. I look in the mirror and every time I see myself more and more like her. I say to myself: I am a mother, but also: I am my mother. How I would happily laugh then. (OR)