It's Mother’s Day, 2025, and I am writing this at 2 am in my bed. After falling asleep at 8 pm after a beautiful Saturday, my body and mind had had enough. We were tired. Over the last few weeks, it's been one fantastic celebration after another, from moments of sadness to tears of liberation. It was never meant to last forever. Keeps playing in my head as I write while remembering one of the best birthday seasons I’d had in a long time. There were no big fancy parties (although I did go to Coachella for the first time) or luxurious trips (again, Coachella and the lit AF Artist Passes I had because of my talented AF friends). At the same time, that was amazing. This birthday season has been one of the best because of the intimacy of my village and the amount of love surrounding me; my heart is happy. Life is beautiful!
I say birthday season because it’s spring, the time of year I was born, a blooming of seeds planted, and getting kissed by the sun. It’s my birthday season because I am in full bloom and trusting when I sit up tall, like a freshly bloomed flower (if you have taken a class, workshop, and/or attended a retreat with me, then you’ve heard me say this before), it’s a cue not to make yourself small and allow for the elements to nourish you, no matter how precarious.
Back to forever, I wonder what prompted the creation of this word (I looked it up), and it still didn’t make sense as to the need to create a word that carried so many expectations and weight. I felt the weight of this word, deeply, as I lay next to my mother after she’d taken her last breath, and said, “I guess now I will be alone forever,” and that is the mantra I assigned on April 20, 2002, to my new life without my mother.
It wasn’t meant to last forever.
Over the next 23 years, I’d chart my path, run my race, blah blah blah, all the things you do to avoid the thing you need to do most…fall apart. The day would come, many breakdowns and breakthroughs, many snot flying and tears which felt like they wouldn’t end, for me to understand, it wasn’t supposed to last forever, nothing does, and that is ok. The minute I stopped, paused, and got still enough to listen, I knew it wasn’t supposed to last forever. Still, my resolve, determination, and resilience as the daughter of Cynthia Geneva Lawson will last, not only forever in me, but its knowing that the woman I came from, who only lived 47years earthside and 19 of those years as my mama, will live on through me, my brother, his children, and the souls I get to birth when called.
Let’s not let forever keep us small. Allow it to instigate the desire to thrive, love, bloom, and sit tall like a freshly bloomed flower. Forever isn’t in charge; we are. Let forever keep us anchored in the now. Now.
Mom, I love you now and what has thus far proven as forever. May your continued journey surprise and delight you, and I continue to live in a way where life surprises and delights me too.
Happy Mother’s Day!
Love,
Alicia C. Easter, daughter of Cynthia Geneva Lawson
