Hold Both

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day is a profoundly complex holiday. It can be such a wonderful, significant, special day, a day to honor mothers and all that they do, to celebrate the ways that they faithfully love and sacrifice and nurture. Motherhood can feel like such a hard and thankless job, and it is truly a beautiful thing to celebrate mothers.

But it can also be a very hard and painful day. For those who have lost their mothers, it can be a sharp reminder of their grief and sadness. For those whose mothers did not love them well, it can bring up complex emotions of sadness, anger, and betrayal. And it can emphasize the heavy emptiness of those who long to be mothers, but are not.

In the last years, I’ve heard a lot of people wrestling through the complexities of Mother’s Day. How do we celebrate and honor while caring for those who are hurting? How do we rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn, when it’s all happening at once? These are incredibly difficult and important questions.

Our own individual emotional reactions are often varied and complex. A move triggers feelings of sadness and fear, as well as excitement and happiness. A graduation is cause for pride and celebration, but it is tinged with sadness for the season that is ending. Even vacations can involve anticipation and joy as well as stress and anxiety.

So often we think that we have to pick, that if emotions are conflicting they can’t sit side by side, but that is simply not true. It is possible to feel conflicting emotions and hold them all at the same time. We all have this experience, but our nature is to fight it, to resist it, and try to land on one emotion that succinctly describes our emotional reaction. We do this at an individual level when we long for one simple word to describe how we are doing or feeling. Sad. Scared. Happy. Excited. Angry. It would be so much simpler if we could just pick one. And we try to oversimplify at the societal level too, wanting to acknowledge only the joy and celebration or only the hurt and grief.

But our experiences, both at the individual and societal level, are much more complex than that. We have various emotions, sometimes even contradictory emotions, at varying intensities, all at the same time. And that is okay. We can acknowledge, experience, and care for multiple emotions at the same time. There can be room and space for that.

My daughter was born 18 days after my son turned two. She was a fussy baby, and needed to be held most of the time. That same summer my son broke his arm, and needed to be held a lot as well. He used to look up at me with his chubby cheeks and big eyes and say “Hold both, Mama, hold both.”

I think of that phrase sometimes when I experience multiple strong emotions. I need to hold both, the happiness and the sadness, the excitement and the fear. And, as a community, we need to create space for those who are celebrating and those who are grieving and those who are waiting. One does not diminish the other. We can hold both.

#relationships #communication #emotions #arlingtoncounselingassociates #counseling #laurenshaw