I tend to find my writing flows more naturally when I’m writing about grief or personal experiences, and I wrote this piece recently. I’d really appreciate any feedback—especially on flow, pacing, and whether anything feels repetitive or unclear. I’m also wondering if the emotional impact comes through, even for people who haven’t had a similar experience.
My Mother’s Face
For the motherless daughters on Mother’s Day
There is no love like a child’s love for their mother.
Having been a child loving my mother, a motherless child, a childless mother, a mother loving my children without my own mother, and now a mother whose oldest is building his own nest away from his mother, that truth has followed me through every phase.
In my baby book that I still have from the early 1980s, my mom wrote down something I said when I was very young: “Mom, I just really love your face.” She thought it was so endearing that she had to document it so she wouldn’t forget.
Now, so many years after she's been gone, I can't really remember the exact contours of her face in that same way as when I looked at her as a child. I can see pictures of her and understand that those flat pixels represent the person she was, but memory can be like a leaky sieve, only holding onto certain details.
I can still plainly remember the feeling though, as clear as that moment when I first said it, even though I was just barely old enough to pronounce the words. I imagine this is what every newborn baby thinks when they gaze into their mother's eyes for the first time: mom, I just really love your face.
As George Eliot wrote in The Mill on the Floss, “Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.” Nothing more complex. Nothing more simple. Just a child loving her mother.
So, here’s to all the children loving their mothers with a purity and intensity that can only come from an innocent child: one who lacks any understanding of hunger or pain or longing for something they cannot have, because every need is met in that first embrace of their mother.
To the mothers gazing back, holding those moments for their children without even realizing how deeply they are felt—even when you feel tired or worn down, or not your best. Because to your children, you are always angelic and beautiful. You are what they came from and what has always been there: the origin, the mother, the giver, and the foundation of all things beautiful. Later in life, when they do experience pain or longing, they can return to that place and draw from that well, remembering that when it all began, they were wanted and safe and loved.
And most of all, to the children, no matter how old—even if you are a wrinkled great-grandmother yourself — who are missing and remembering the gaze of their own beautiful mother today, I see you.
Mother’s Day is not just about spending time with our mothers who are still here with us, but about honoring and returning to the universal experience of the mother. It’s about remembering the lines of grandmothers and mothers and daughters that came before us and that will come after us: the ones we remember clearly, the ones we are gazing at today, the ones we see through pixelated photographs but clear feelings, and the ancestors who came before us—who we may have never met, or only knew briefly—but who shaped our very DNA, and who once gazed at our mothers, who then gazed into us all of their wisdom and strength and beauty.
And to my own mom, in whatever universe or plane you still exist, I still just really love your face.
No matter how much our experiences may differ as we grow older in life, there is one universal human truth that never changes: We all came from a mother. And the first time we saw her face, it changed everything.