Mother's Day Tarot

Photo by Robyn Beattie

I’ll be celebrating Mother’s Day by inviting my children to join me first in the yoga studio, followed by breakfast after, the present their presence. It’s been two years since I lost my own mother and I’m feeling like the Tarot Angel in the Temperance card, well--like I’m floating between her two cups, the streams of joy and sorrow passing through the filament of my body. Joy for my daughter graduating high school this summer and sorrow I can’t share that moment with my mother. But the truth is, we are surrounded by mothers and there’s an abundance of love, my mother-in-law and family members and friends coming from near and far to celebrate with us, and truly, my mother in spirit. I think also of the Empress, that beautiful card for mothering and nurturing, asking us to consider where in our lives we can honor the mother in ourselves, the mothers who mothered us, and the environments of beauty, harmony, in nature, or of our making, in which we thrive. 

Luna and the Butterfly Lantern

I’ll spend this Mother's Day afternoon (May 12) reading Tarot cards at Yoga with Shawna. Come play with me in Imperial Beach if you need to either spoil yourself or spoil your mother with some Tarot love. Sessions on Sundays are the 20 minute shorter readings. If you live far away, you can always book through my main site's Consult Page for virtual Tarot love. Tarot consults come with a Butterfly Lantern postcard bearing a personalized prompt for journaling and meditation based on your reading. Here's Luna, preparing to drink from my daughter's blue paint water, the famous disturber of art projects, this cat, famous dumper over of flower and paintbrush bouquet vases. 

And for my daughter, for the honor of being her mother, a paragraph I wrote with my Poetry Read and Critique class this spring:

Alice in Flames by Robyn Beattie

"Will you braid my hair," she asks, when we are late, ten minutes past when we should have left, all of us trained, her brother carrying her backpack...I've got her coffee and mine plus her second cup of yogurt and granola. We'll pull up at the curb in front of school where she'll have forgotten her shoes, ask to be driven around to the side gate. But that she ever asks--I am stunned--my daughter, did she just say, "Mom, braid my hair?" The very teen, averts the goodbye kiss, the one you can hug but no, no kiss on cheek, not even top of head, the very teen, at Christmas, will land all eighteen years of legs into your lap, always on her terms... always, always braid your daughter's hair when she asks.

Back in 2013 I compiled a pastiche of past Feral Mom Mother’s Day posts; very nostalgic as the kids get older and I look back to the time before the boys were taller than sunflowers, near taller than my husband (taller certainly than yours truly). Here’s a link to that post: A Modest Bouquet: Ten Mother’s Day Posts.

And here’s a more recent grief post at Tarot for Two about saying goodbye to my mother through the lens of Reversal, or The Hanged One.

Poetry Read and Critique, SDWI

Second Saturdays Poetry Read and Critique meets this coming Saturday, May 11 at Liberty Station from 10-12. We are a happy, lively, heart-open and passionate group of poets. Walk-ins welcome. We are playing with writing list poems and looking at fairytale themes and apologues this weekend; to that end we have poems by Maggie Smith, Ruth Thompson, Rebecca Chamaa, Shel Silverstein and more on our worksheet. I hope to see you there.

Photos by Robyn Beattie, with the exception of Luna (by yours truly).