Some months back I held a giveaway. For each person who completes the sentence, If you could ask your mother one question, it would be … I will forward a free pdf of my novel, Seasons in Purdah. For the twenty or more who have responded, I have also included a free pdf version of my latest novel, When the Drum Major Died.
The major characters, women, in my stories, face, as any well-developed protagonist, a major life dilemma, transition, problems. But unlike the central characters in other novels, my protagonist always find the key to solving their problem(s) through drawing closer to their mothers.
They gain strength to confront the antagonist of their fears, and the antagonist who or that stirs their anxieties by revisiting the relationship(s) with their mothers and resolving, working through issues and finding common ground in relationship with their mothers.
Our mothers hold the seeds to who we are, the compass to where we stand, the map to where we are going. We might not like how they behave and speak, what they say, do to and do not do with us. But they are and will remain our mothers in this lifetime–the individual who provided the portal–served as the gateway–through which we stepped onto the earthly plane and entered life into this world.
Differences and divisions separating and delimiting us from our mothers, split the individual we are down the middle. They incise our hearts and excise the spirit from our souls.
Bridging the gap of interactions that distance us from our mothers does not render them or us as perfect beings. Rather it reframes the course of interactions that bind us in a manner that no long seeks or requires perfection for love to present.
Our mothers are who we are. And we, their daughters, are them. In spite and because of who they have been and grow to become, we are whom destiny deems us. Our mothers are both our destiny and the ground of being from which our fate arises.
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