Unpacking

So I'm still unloading my car and putting things away--perhaps implying that I've been doing it nonstop since my arrival in Los Angeles, but to the contrary. It takes far less time than it feels like it's going to, but I often find other things to do, perhaps avoiding the prospect of getting settled into this new motherless LA life.

As I'm emptying my laundry basket this morning, which I used like a suitcase, I come across a poncho that my mom crocheted for me. The poncho craze was always a little puzzling to me, since my mom wore a poncho when she brought my brother and me home from the hospital in a blanket made from matching yellow yarn. Am I really old enough that a fad that was popular at the time of my birth has been retro-ized? When the poncho came back, my mom offered to make me one, and so I picked out a yarn and she made it. I didn't really like it that much, because the pattern she used had this weird collar on it that looked, to put it nicely, dorky.

But this morning, I pulled the poncho out of the laundry basket and held it in front of me taking a good long look. I pulled it close to me and felt the softness of the yarn, and then I put it on over my pajamas and couldn't help but thinking that this is the closest I'll get to a hug from my mom, and now I wish she'd made me a hundred of these stupid ponchoes, so I could wear one every day. But isn't that the way with gestures of love? We make our attempts to show love, but it doesn't always fit what we're looking for or what we want, or we think we don't need it, so we minimize, we reject, we ignore. But when that love is gone we strive to grasp any memory of whatever attempt was made, no matter how clumsy or how ill-fitting.

I wish I could say that this moment with a poncho in my bedroom would change my life and make me more accepting of the loving gestures that people make toward me or make me more intentional and concentrated in my loving gestures toward others, and it's possible. But perhaps this pain and these tears are as much a part of truly experiencing and receiving love, because the love that I didn't understand or receive was still given. Even if we reject love that is given, that love doesn't disappear into thin air, does it? Maybe it floats around and follows us until we receive it and accept it and then it gloms onto us and doesn't let go. And maybe rather than working on being more loving, it would be more beneficial to work on receiving love, because it seems that the very nature of receiving love doesn't suck it out of the universe and create a vaccuum. Instead, love is more transformational, isn't it? It changes us. It multiplies in us. Receiving love makes us more loving.

So if you ever see me in public wearing a multi-colored handmade poncho long after they're out of fashion, you'll know that I'm walking around draped in my mother's love.