- not a proper mother's day entry. If you are my mother, don't read this.

I will be calling mom tonight. Because tomorrow's the day the florists have made. And because I love my mom and I've still got her in the world. But ... there's ...

something on this electrical breeze... so much pain in the world, so much sadness and anger and regret and resentment. So much guilt and shame and uncertain confusion. So many real wounds. So much loss.

I read the online journals of my friends here on this Mother's Day weekend and get knocked over by big waves of unresolved longing for connections unmade or lost or impossible. So many different shades of misery. I'm rolling in this ocean all stunned by the sadness, wanting to raise my hand above the surf - not drowning but waving - as if a simple greeting might matter, knowing that I've got nothing but stupid ready-made platitudes.

"Time heals all wounds."

"If it hurts it's good for you."

"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

That's all a load of crap...especially when the painful mess is grinning right in yr face, whistling through its rotten teeth a tune that goes "this is all you get, suck it up." My friends are hurting and I want to make it stop but I know I can't.

Parents are always a problem. Can we ever forgive them for failing to become the gods and goddesses of our idolatry? Can we or they ever love each other enough or talk enough or hang out enough? Can we or they ever get over this distance which is so universal that it must have some biological function? Parents teach us everything that matters ... even when they are bad parents, distant parents or utterly gone. I will not now list everything that matters. You know already - because you've had parents. Poet William Meredith says, "Everything/ they do is wrong, and the worst thing,// they all do it, is to die,/ taking with them the last explanation,// how we came out of the wet sea/ or wherever they got us from..."

I'm thinking of Allen Ginsberg and his mother Naomi, whose mental illness seems to have presented him with a large early lesson. How could it not have been? Upon her death he howled out a masterpoem of love and sorrow in "Kaddish". He wrote, "At forty, varicosed, nude, fat, doomed, hiding outside the apartment door near the elevator calling Police, yelling for her girl-friend Rose to help -/ Once locked herself in with razor or iodine -- could hear her cough in tears at sink -- Lou broke through the glass green-painted door, we pulled her out to the bedroom."

Later he is able to sing:

Blessed be you Naomi in tears! Blessed be you Naomi in fears! Blessed Blessed Blessed in sickness!

Blessed be you Naomi in Hospitals! Blessed be you Naomi in solitude! Blest be your triumph! Blest be your bars! Blest be your last year's loneliness!

Blest be your failure! Blest be your stroke! Blest be the close of your eye! Blest be the gaunt of your cheek! Blest be your withered thighs!

Blessed be Thee Naomi in Death! Blessed be Death! Blessed be Death!

Blessed be He Who leads all sorrow to Heaven! Blessed be He in the end!

Blessed be He who builds Heaven in Darkness! Blessed Blessed Blessed be He! Blessed be He! Blessed be Death on us All!

How far must we travel before we can call down similar blessings upon our own imperfect, broken lives and the perfectly imperfect mothers and fathers who brought us to them?