Tonight's entry is very short. Really, I just mean to wish every mother a Happy Mother's Day.

We tend to look at a day like today as one of celebration and remembrance of the woman who either gave birth to us, or adopted us, the one who held us when we hurt and made us feel tall when nothing else seemed to. She took us by the hand and led us to ourselves, moving only as fast as we, their children, could go.

There is another piece of Mother's Day that no hallmark card wants to explore; that of pain, and then forgiveness. At some point in our lives we begin to see our parents through the lens of our own adulthood, one to which they had at least some part in leading us (as I said, by the hand). We lose our innocent adoration of them and start to look critically at all of the bits of us that we don't usually share, the memories of their human subjectivity and fallibility that we cannot want to accept. Nor can we grasp at it, as it resides only in a past told through our subconscious whose face we see in terms of its imperfection and what we like to qualify as their outdatedness. In effect, we do not want to live with the side-effects of being someone else's children; as such, we strike out at it. This becomes even more acute and defensible as our parents age, becoming more rigidly the people they were, or changing into people with whom our affinity may not be as apparent.

I won't get into details about why this occurs here, at least not in my own case. It should only suffice to say that the idea of forgiveness becomes paramount when we move through, then past, this phase of our adulthood. Yet, the forgiveness goes both ways; we must forgive them, and we must forgive ourselves for the guilt of having felt this way in the first place. When Dickinson says "the heart asks pleasure first / and then, excuse from pain" she is not just speaking of the love we all assume; she speaks of any love, any time when we adore, then challenge, then hurt, then beg forgiveness. In this vein, when we move through all of the motions and emotions of days like today, we need to make sure we can live with the past, the present, and the most hopeful future of who we are and who they are to us.

So, in that spirit, Happy Mother's Day; may you love, forgive, and treasure what your hearts asks and what their's have given to you. Good night / boa noite / buenas noches.