What a fixed date asks of us

On Día de las Madres, two Sundays sharing a calendar, and the first place we ever lived

Two weeks ago I left for Santa Fe. The trip was mostly business, and Santa Fe is also a place I once called home. The light is still the light I remember. The streets carry the names I knew. The dry cool air at altitude moves in the same way through the body. And yet the feeling has shifted, because I am no longer the person who lived there. I came back to Querétaro last Saturday, and over the days since, the city has been preparing for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is May 10, Día de las Madres in México. This year, by an uncommon meeting of calendars, the same Sunday holds Mother’s Day in the United States. The two holidays usually fall on different days, and the overlap reveals something about how each country holds them. In the U.S., the date floats. It moves to whichever Sunday best suits the family schedule. In México, the date is fixed. It has been May 10 since 1922, and the country adopted that date with the kind of conviction that made it permanent. When May 10 falls on a Tuesday, families gather. When it lands on a Saturday or Sunday, the same. There is something psychologically intelligent in a fixed date. A movable holiday tells you that the day exists for your convenience. A fixed one tells you that you exist for the day.

James Hollis writes about what he calls the maternal imago, the inner image of the mother that is laid down in us long before we have language for it. The image forms before we choose anything, taking shape through the dailiness of being held, fed, looked at, spoken to. The maternal imago becomes the first map of the world we inherit. It tells us, well before we can question it, what closeness will cost, what abandonment feels like, what it means to be received. Jung describes the Great Mother as one of the foundational archetypes of the psyche, present in every mythology and every dream life, present in the way we show up in our adult relationships whether we recognize her or not.

The mother is a place. She is the first place we ever lived. Like any first place, she leaves a topography in us that all the later landscapes are layered on top of. Returning to Santa Fe this past week reminded me of how a former home stays alive in the body even when the body has moved on. The mother stays alive in the same way, with even greater depth, because we lived in her before we knew the word for living.

My own mother is living. We speak when we speak, and she is in my mind tomorrow as she has been on every Mother’s Day of my life, and on the other days too. This is a privilege. Many readers will sit tomorrow with a memory rather than a phone call. Some of you will hold a complicated love. Some of you will sit with the residue of a relationship that hurt more than it nourished. Tomorrow holds room for all of that. The day is large enough. The maternal in us is large enough. The first place was sometimes tender and sometimes hard, and the work of integrating what we received and what was missing is a long work, often the central work of a life.

What a fixed date asks of us, finally, is the simple act of showing up. Showing up at the door of someone who held us, if we can. Showing up at the gravesite, if that is where she now lives. Showing up to our own interior, where the maternal imago continues to organize the way we love and work and care for the people in our orbit. Tomorrow is a chance to honor the living, mourn the gone, forgive what can be forgiven, and let the rest find some room to breathe inside us.

Tonight in Querétaro, flower vendors near the centro have been busy since Tuesday, and tomorrow before the sun is fully up, mariachi music will rise somewhere nearby. Las mañanitas que cantaba el rey David, the song begins, and a country will be awake by the time it ends.

If you are able, call her. If she is gone, light something for her. If the relationship was hard, sit with what is true and be gentle with the one who came through it. The first place we ever lived deserves at least the dignity of our attention, on a day a country chose to keep.