Fellow BlogHer Contributing Editor Jenn Satterwhite wrote a post earlier this month called Tributes for Mothers: A (re)definition." Jenn ends her post blog giving kudos to the person who said "Mother is a verb" and she asks bloggers to write posts this Mother's Day about people, both female and male, who have been like a mother to them.

When I read Jenn's post, which is very touching and well done, I knew I wouldn't write a new post in the way she requested because I've written about the women who were like a mother to me and my actual mother who definitely mothered me before in a poem called "Three." I've mentioned this poem in the post "Alzheimer's in the Family."

My three mothers are my Grandmother Mamie, my Aunt Ruth, and my birth mother, Fannie Naomi. My grandmother died when I was in my twenties. My Aunt Ruth died when I was nine.

I was in my mid-thirties when I realized I had been blessed with three mothers for a period of my life. Thinking on this I wondered, God, what must I be destined to face that you should give me three mothers. How much support does one person need?

There's nothing that unusual about my life, and all the mothers in the world can't protect us from common human tribulations. The most bitter trouble for me came a few years later after I wondered about my three mothers, the kind of trouble humans face all the time, loss and grief. I faced the dissolution of a twenty-plus-years marriage, the news that my mother had both stomach cancer and Alzheimer's, and that I would need a kidney within 10 years, now down to six or seven, all in the same year. Two years later I watched my hometown drown on TV, and right now, facing economic realities, I'm torn about returning to that hometown while it struggles with desolation.

I am a woman of faith and so belief in God keeps me going, but so many times it's the belief in the strength of these women that moves me along day to day, the knowledge that their blood runs through me. Sometimes in bouts of darkest depression, I say, "What the hell is wrong with you, Nordette? You cannot fail life. Think of Mamie, think of Ruth, think of your female ancestors before them, and think of your mother. They faced challenges much harder than you're facing. You can't be the weakest link. Stand up for your own children, your own life, and be real woman."

Mother as Poem

As a poet I channel emotions through words. Usually the emotions and concepts spring from the muses, but as a practical, working writer, I occasionally craft verse for special occasions. When I watch my websites' statistics, I sometimes get a sense of what people want to read. Each year people pop by my websites looking for poetry about mothers, which is why last year I wrote a brief piece called "In Honor of Our Mothers" that points people to some of my mother-related poems.

Possibly many people are disappointed because they're not looking for the kind of poetry I tend to write. They're probably looking for greeting cards to recite at a Mother's Day program, something to which most people will relate, shed a tear, or that the congregation will "oooh an ahhhh" to when a children's Sunday School class recites it.

My poems about mothers are specific to me or to a certain individual. However, I know that despite their specificity, they still touch readers who grapple with the loss of a mother, memories of their childhood, mother-child conflict, or what it means to be a mother themselves. People grapple with the meaning of motherhood all year long, and sometimes a few write to tell me how they feel about a mother poem.

In particular I see search requests like "poems about black mothers" or "African American mothers day poetry." Perhaps some website owners catering to African Americans are looking for poems to post on their sites or a black blogger wants to recognize Mother's Day in a post. I don't know. I keep the poems posted and hope that whoever looks for such poetry is honest enough to give the poet credit for writing the poem.

Motherly Associations

This year I wrote another mother-related poem. The poem's concept came to me, and I tossed it aside at first because it's a common concept, that of a mother's hands. As Jenn's post notes, "mother is a verb." So perhaps it's logical that when we think of mothers we think of work and thoughts of work leads to thoughts of hands. "Why write the ordinary and obvious in a poem?" I asked myself.

Later Bill Withers old song from the 70s, "Grandma's Hands," started playing in my head.

Grandma's hands
Used to issue out a warning
She'd say, "Billy don't you run so fast
Might fall on a piece of glass
"Might be snakes there in that grass"
Grandma's hands (Lyrics)

Recalling the song almost sealed the deal. Don't you hate it when you can't get a song out of your head? I would write nothing about a mother's hands.

The world overflows with poems that have titles like "My Mother's Hands." Here's one classified specifically as an electronic greeting card: "Mother's Hands." In addition, here are other mothers-hands themed poems, songs, vignettes, and even art:

• My Mother's Hands, lyrics by Debi Smith

"The Most Beautiful Hands," a rememberance by Shery Ma Belle Arrieta

"I have my mother's hands," a blog post from Rory Kearn

"My Mother's Hands," a post from Under the Mad Hat, in which a blogger touches her dead mother's hands and remembers life.

"Mother's Hands," a poem by Duncan Wyllie

"My Mother's Hands," a poem by Sharon Jordan

"In Mother's Hands," a photo

"Mother's Hands," a painting by Madelyn Raska

"My Mother's Hands," the photo pictured at the top of this post, by Gary H. Spielvogel

Here's an excerpt from a poignant memory piece by Kate Duddling:

My mother's hands were thin, there wasn't much meat on them. You could see the bones and veins through the translucent skin on the backs of her hands. She had long, slender fingers. She let her nails grow about 1/4" be- yond her fingertips, and she filed her nails into delicate ovals. She always wore her platinum wedding band, and as long as she wasn't doing anything dirty or wet, she also wore her matching engagement ring, with its round, brilliant cut diamond.

The more I thought about her hands, the more I remembered. ("My Mother's Hands" by Duddling)

I think that not only is "the great mother" an archetype but also "a mother's hands," and that's why so may people write about the hands of those who've mothered them. As you can see, creative, thoughtful people recall their mothers' hands in music, poetry, visual art, and now blogs.

Here's a poster/photograph by Andre Kertesz also called "My Mother's Hands." There's even a book called From My Mother's Hands. According to its publisher the book "celebrates the positive roles mothers can play in the lives of daughters. In a collection of poignant memoirs crafted from interviews with thirty-three notable Texas women, Susie Kelly Flatau weaves a tapestry of intimate memories, family photographs and recipes, and profiles of each daughter."

So, as many of my readers are also writers, you know that I resisted writing about a mother's hands. Working writers loathe being associated with cliches and banality. But an archetype, now that's different! So, I wrote a poem called "Mama's hands working grace." Maybe I couldn't help myself.

Mama's hands working grace
By Nordette Adams

Sometimes we sink sorrowful and eye
brooding skies for blessings.
   They have skin like black pearls,
   eyes deep with wisdom, the light that honors
   the broken and burdened.

We wrestle in the brown clay of frailty,
claw up from mud, wearing our brokenness like rusted armor,
and we seek beauty dark like us--
hair roped or kinked like ours,
lips burning with fullness of hungry dreams for
children and fathers and the bettering of this village,
with noses wide enough to breathe all God in until chests
rise and fall in disrobed joy.

The signs of beauty dark like us are mama's hands working.

These hands pull infants up by ankles,
slap diapers down, cool and wrap bottoms.
These hands strip collard greens,
pick a chicken, sift red beans,
chop the garlic, onion, and green peppers
that season us to face a hard planet.

They simmer us in our grumblings until we learn to sing,
stop the whine and work through stings.

These hands discipline the backtalking mouth,
the stupid, boy-crazy girl,
the boy crazy for street trouble who swaggers to his beat,
disbelieving truth--
Death respects nobody,
Death don't spare.

These hands soothe
big black men with big mother spirit when they
scream like the colicky babe choked up on milk,
soured by a world that don't want 'em,
when we grown but shaken and we weep 'cuz life's too much--
somtimes life's all too much like a long, humiliating death.

These hands type or file or wait tables or drive buses
so more hands will find bread or tie shoe laces or go to college.

We grab at love swelling in these hands,
warm, curling fingers, palms
lined first faintly with life's unprobed paths,
later branded by a tangle of choices made putting us first.
She puts us first like the God who calls us children.

Our brown-hand mothers rise with the sun,
work past its setting, and gift us with the power of
brown-hand women cherishing fruit of the womb.

(c) Copyright 2007 Nordette Adams. All rights reserved.

Perhaps there are some aspects of motherhood and what it means to mother that we can't flee. It is said, after all, that "a mother's work is never done." What do we associate with the doing of tasks more than hands?

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Photo credits: More than likely the blogger at SoundRoots found this picture of brown hands at a stock photo site, but I found it at his/her blog post about brownness and a band called Los Mococos. The top photo in this post is called "My Mother's Hands" or "hands of 87 years" by Gary Spielvogel.

Special Mother's Day blogger note: I didn't know the following history fact. BlogHer's Britt Bravo tells us in her post "Mother's Day for Peace" that Mother's Day began as a protest against the Civil War. I guess I overlooked this information along the way and thought Mother's Day may have been the profitable but wise invention of a greeting card company.

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Nordette Adams blogs several places, one of which is Confessions of a Jersey Goddess.