At the end of the month, my firstborn is turning 10. A milestone for both of us.
Last year at this time, we were packing boxes, saying goodbye to friends and moving cities. The Spouse and I worked hard to make the transition as smooth as possible for each other and for our kids, but change always requires so much courage, doesn’t it? There were inevitably rocky stretches along our road. This year, we understand all that a little more, and still we see change on the horizon. A 10th birthday is a leap into double digits and also an ending. Not the ending of childhood—we are not there yet—but we are at the end of a first stage with our first child. And I feel a little dizzy at the thought.
I took her photo last summer, standing in front of the National Gallery in Ottawa. She looked so tall, all legs and long hair caught like a flag in the wind. She had been playing with her brothers underneath the huge sculpture of a spider that stands near the entrance to the gallery, its thin legs arched like the gallery’s own iconic roofline. For a moment, she paused and turned towards me with a grin, so I snapped a photo. She looked lovely.
Later, she said that she felt little. It was a bit like standing in a church. Everything was so high above her.
The French-American artist Louise Bourgeois created this sculpture in 1999, and since then it has been cast many times for galleries around the world. It is called “Maman,” and is one of many spiders she had made, beginning with simple ink and charcoal sketches dating back to 1947. She played with the spider image throughout her life as a way of honouring her own mother, Josephine, a weaver who worked with tapestries in the family’s textile restoration workshop in Paris. Through her art and her writing, Bourgeois reflected on the cleverness of spiders, the resourcefulness and quiet grace with which they weave and the complicated juxtapositions they inspire. Maman is the largest of Bourgeois’ spiders, and yet in it she evokes thoughts of fragility and strength, of protection, enclosure and perhaps threat, too, of daintiness, vulnerability and tough, nurturing love. When you stand underneath her, as my long-legged daughter did, you can see that she holds a clutch of marble eggs in her belly, these promises of new life looking both protected and captured.
Motherhood is a complicated place.
But strange and radical images of motherhood can be useful, too. They can awaken us to new ways of seeing what it means to be children of God. The Bible has many stories of strange mothering. Some are obscure and almost forgotten, emerging to surprising light in the histories and the prophets.
Others stand giant among us like Bourgeois’ spider, casting strange shadows. Like Moses’ mother who made the Nile an extension of her own body to hide and cradle her growing child. Like Mary, who knew that her Yes means the glory of Love among us, and yet her heart still lurched when her son was lost on the way home from Jerusalem. And like that son, who used the image of a mother hen sheltering her chicks beneath her wings to teach his friends that mothering love is not gendered and cannot be quenched.
That is the love that knit us together in our mother’s womb, and that’s the love we’re given when we are given children.
Ten years ago, when I still cradled my daughter in my belly, I looked around our tiny apartment and prayed that we would be able to fill it with all the love, faith and hope she needed. Now, I see that we cannot fill spaces. Rather, we need to keep them open. With open hands, we give and receive.
With open hearts, we learn how to love. That’s how we grow, isn’t it? Grow and we watch the children grow around us, each of us learning to let go a little that we might find the ways in which we are held together. For my daughter’s birthday this year, I would like to give her open spaces, sheltered enough that she will feel loved, and yet high enough above her head that she will find the space to grow.
