the motherlode - new moon in cancer

Exactly six years ago today, I was in Idaho, spending a week with my mom. I loved those ‘get away’ weeks - sitting outside by the river, listening to music , shelling fresh Dungeness crab under the moonlight and eating it with our fingers, and talking about everything from Sartre & Kafka to Dr. Phil & Oprah. I loved our forays to the farmer’s market to buy fresh goat cheese, homemade wine and patchouli scented soaps and bath oils. Mostly I loved that during those times I didn’t have to be a grown-up wife and mother and grandmother. That although I was ( underneath the expensively maintained and colored hair) as gray as she was, she indulged me and my ‘flights of fancy,’ called me ‘sweetiecakes,’ and told everyone I was her spoiled rotten princess.


I miss my mom. I miss our daily conversations, I miss how she would share my outrage at the injustices in the world, I miss that sense of security that came from knowing whenever I needed her, she would be there to kiss my boo-boos and make everything all better. I miss having a mother and being her daughter.

And even though I wear the crown of queen proudly, I miss the days I was a Princess to her Queen.

“If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.” (Wynonna Judd)

Now, I don’t want to gloss over reality here – the relationship with my mother over the years was the most conflicted and tumultuous relationship of (both) our lives. There were the times my greatest joy was in being my mother’s daughter, and also the times when I passionately wished I was anyone but my mother’s daughter. It was hard at times to love her, and then there were the years I believed she sat up at night making a list of ways to insult, criticize, blame and/or ‘get me’. To steal a nursery rhyme, “when it was good it was very, very good and when it was bad it was rotten.”

It’s the ‘very, very good’ parts I choose to hold onto today. It’s the relationship we had, especially in the last year of her life, I grieve the most. All the rest of it was just drama and illusion, and isn’t important anymore.

I had no idea how much my mother’s physical death would impact my life or how profoundly I would feel her loss. I would have added some conversations to the many we had towards the end if I had known. I would have asked her how I was supposed to live the rest of my life without her, because still today, six years later, there are the moments when I don’t know how I am going to do it and I weep with longing.

So, in the realm of divine timing, it comes as no surprise that this New Moon is all about “mother love.” Cancer rules hearth and home with its archetypal mother energy. Add to that a Sun/Moon/Venus (Goddess of Love and the Mother of the Universe) type conjunction, and well – there we have it - the lay of the land – a mother lode of mother love just waiting to surround and envelope us.

I am my mother’s daughter, whether it’s on the physical (mom) or spiritual (Great Mother Creator) plane. That is my heritage, my lineage, and my genealogy. It is the blood that flows in my veins and the image in which I was created. Magna Mater, Mama, Mother, and Goddess – I am of her and she is within me.

My mom died, but I know she is sitting on the cusp of the moon, looking down on me and I hear her voice within the calling of this new moon. 

The New Moon that now guides the child in us to turn our bikes around and remember. The stars are starting to dot the sky, darkness is coming, and our mother stands on the back porch, calling us home from our travels.

Is there anything better than the communion that happens when, once home from our travels, we crawl into her lap, rest our heads against her heartbeat, and feel her arms encircle us, holding us close as we tell her all the places we’ve been?