Ahhh, it’s so picturesque—the scene I painted in yesterday’s blog. I love that I was able to capture that moment.
But… there are other moments when that woman just gets on my last nerve.
I mean, it wouldn’t be a true mother-daughter relationship if it were all sunshine and butterflies… am I right??
I don’t know what it was. I honestly work really hard to put on my caregiver face whenever I’m around Mom. It serves as a type of armor that protects me from taking anything personally and blowing up at her.
Yesterday, my armor was seriously cracked.
Maybe I was looking forward to digging in peace. I don’t know, but she was there watching me and finally said, “You’re gonna wear yourself out doing all that digging.”
As I’m writing this and picturing the scene, my more rational self wonders what the hell I got so upset about. But the truth is, if I am working my ass off and sweaty as hell, it is NOT a good time to say ANYTHING to me. So, it makes sense.
Instead of just blowing it off and ignoring her, I snapped: “DO YOU MIND?!”
Oh my gosh, it just makes me chuckle… 17-year-old Starr had apparently taken control of my body, and it took me a bit to get her back under control. I think I was just pissed off all day.
But then… so was Mom.
And as I look at it again, I realize how incredibly intuitive she is. She’s never acknowledged it, but I have seen it in action. I can tell you, I learned much of what I know about my knowing from her.
So… today, now, I can see that there was some kind of funky energy in the air, and we were just picking up on it. There wasn’t ever anything personal, and we know from Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements that there never is.
We ended up okay—we always do. When we began this journey a few months ago, getting angry at each other was highly dramatic. But we’re learning that we can just move on. Eventually, I figured out that I hadn’t journaled or meditated for three days. Once I did, I was able to manage things better.
In the late afternoon, we sat in the shade next to the pond.
A woodpecker flew in and began drinking from the hummingbird feeder. This aggravated the hummingbird, but she simply moved over to another feeder and had her fill.
I watched a pair of English sparrows searching for the perfect spot to build a nest. I’ve been observing their courting ritual for days. She had a little twig in her beak while he watched from a few feet away. She flitted between the palo verde trees, and he followed.
It seems we’re building a bird sanctuary as well as a sanctuary for ourselves.
After a while, the wind picked up, and Mom had to move inside. I told her I’d be in soon and sat a while longer, pondering my next moves. Mom had insisted that I listen when she said we had to take care of the mistletoe problem in our trees. Many of them are affected by this parasitic plant, and we honestly don’t have time to waste. Spring is the best time to tend to such things.
The mistletoe makes the trees look very much like something from Dr. Seuss. In a way, it’s beautiful. But it kills the tree, and the only way to get rid of it is to cut off the affected branch. This will leave our trees looking bald as they recover, and it may affect the birds’ habitat.
And yet, I know the trees will come back stronger.
It’s kind of the way of things, isn’t it?
Life has a way of self-correcting. Like the trees, there are cracks and imperfections in this mother-daughter relationship. But there is a fluidity to such things. We learn, we grow, and we move along.
But most of all, we love… even in those moments when we make each other crazy.
