Sacred Places I Have Nursed My Son

In a Chinese Restaurant
Standing in line at the post office
the bank
Grocery store
Home Depot
and pharmacy
in my mother's garden at sunset
Flying over Chicago
Take Off Landing and In-between
In the snow
At a wedding
In a church
and a synagogue
On my (95-year-old) Grandmother's sofa
On the shores of Long Island, the Gulf of Mexico, and Pacific Ocean
On the toilet
During seven-hour train rides
and Satsang
At an anti-war rally
The airport in Dallas, Boston, Albuquerque, and Burlington
A dock on Lake Wentworth
The thrift store floor
At Thanksgiving Dinner
On the bank of the river in the Green Mountains.

Originally printed in Mothering Magazine, May/June 2004

Anne Roiphe, noted novelist, journalist and mother addressed the issue of maternal conflict when she wrote, “If there is too much anger there can be too much guilt. If there is too much guilt we can have trouble letting our children go off to explore the room, the school, the world. If we are too guilty we become frantic with the need to prove to ourselves and others what good mothers we really are. Most of us, feminist or traditional woman, at home or at work, manage to contain the small showers of maternal anger and guilt that are simply a part of normal weather conditions”

from her book Fruitful: Living the Contradictions: A Memoir of Modern Motherhood (1996).

"I told him that when I find myself pushed past my point of no return—that individual, purely subjective point where my spirit feels broken and I cannot tolerate myself or my child in an utterly heart-wrenching way that I could never have imagined when I was pregnant—I must, nonetheless, be a responsible, compassionate, effective, loving parent. This requires me to dig deep into my well and pull myself back from the edge to a safe place where the smallest successful moment of mothering feels like a worldly triumph. Mothering is hard, hard work. Staying home to raise children is a kind of surrender that can feel strangely and simultaneously forsaking and freeing. There’s melancholy and loneliness at the heart of such a commitment of time, energy and breath. It is the pain of giving one’s self over to love for the ultimate purpose of letting go"

Lu Hanessian, Exploring Ambivalence (March-April 2003), in La Leche League’s publication New Beginnings, p.45.