There is a quote from writer Rebecca Solnit that echos in my ear every Mother’s Day. “Everything was my mother but my mother.”

The garden is my mother. The soil is my mother. The plants are my mother. Good food and a warm, soft bed is my mother. The sun and breeze on a warm day is my mother. The rhythm of the lake, the scent of lilacs and roses, a blue sky, the sound of red-winged blackbirds, other people’s words in books and music, the way I care for myself, deliberately and carefully. These are all my mother. This is what and whom I celebrate.

My mother is an apex predator. Her prey is her children. She does not nurture; she attacks and devours. She lives inside me in good ways and bad ways: In my DNA, my nervous system, my memory. But she is not Mother. She is something else. We need another word for this kind of mother.

And those of us who know this mother need our own day of celebration for having survived her.

Image: Photo of my mother taken in the 1960s.