"Be available for life to happen" - Bill Murray

This morning as I was helping Gala get ready for school, while deciding if she would do a side ponytail or rather leave her hair down, in between putting toothpaste on her toothbrush, she asked me through the bathroom mirror, “Mom, after this life. After we die, are you going to be my Mom again?”. Why do kids do this? Why do they come with thebig questions when we are in theprocess of leaving the house, during bedtime or fixing dinner. Their little minds working out feelings and thoughts so big to us, adults, that leak out their little bodies at any moment, without prior notice. I stood there behind her with her hair in one hand and a comb in the other, looking at her little big attentive eyes thinking to myself: I wish I could be your Mom for many many lifetimes, for all the lifetimes, my love. My pause is a form of a code for us. It normally indicates we entered some big territory, which inexplicably gives her some magical patience that any other type of inquiry doesn’t allow. She waited for my answer, which was, “I don’t know. What I do know is that somehow, someway we’ll be close together.” She is 5 1/2, and death has been a part of her vocabulary since my Dad died almost 2 years ago. Something both of us are still trying to understand what to do with, where to put it in our bodies. Often she asks me how he died. Who was there with him? What did he say? Did he say something? I made an agreement that I was going to be completely honest with her and I tell her, with my heart in my hand, how that morning on October 9th, 2019 went all the times she’s asked, which are many. I was very close to my Dad.

He was a mystery to me in a comforting way, more recently he was a friend, a reflector. The one who only needed a few words. His presence was powerful in a non intimidating way, the type of presence of someone who observes life without a rush. My Dad always saw me as an individual, not the extension of him. A person and a soul understanding what it means to be in a body. This is probably one of the things I carry the most into motherhood, theunderstanding that Gala is in her own little world. When I told her I didn’t know I was going to be her Mom again, she said to me, "I will make sure I will have my eyes open to find you. To always find you.” I smiled back at her, swallowed all the love I felt in that moment to keep it inside of me and thought to myself: you will. This makes me think about availability. How available are we to be with life when tenderness arises? How available can we be for tenderness when we are rushing? Are we rushing in order to not touch life’s tenderness? Availability means not only presence to be there as it is happening. It's the heavy lifting work of courage. Taking down thewalls, letting ourselves be touched by it all. Viktor Frankl says "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies growth and freedom". What would happen if you let yourself be available, in order, to be touched? What part of you or what relationship is asking your availability not in clock time but in a tender, open and whole way? 

With love,
Mari