Yesterday was Mother’s Day. It is not a holiday I
celebrate. I am not a mother myself, and as those of you who know something of
my personal history are aware, my relationship with my own mother was
critically wounded when she became mentally ill during my adolescence.
I’m generally not much affected by the holiday.
It’s been years since I left home, and by now I’ve spent more of my life
without my mom than I spent with her. Time heals. But last year I learned that
she had died – in 2007. And ever since then I’ve found myself thinking of her
much more often, of the mother she was when I was young, and of the mother she
became when I was older. And in completing my memoir, which is being released
next month, naturally I’ve had to spend a great deal of time digging deeper
into my long-repressed feelings towards her, this woman I once loved with all
my heart.
And maybe that’s why, on Sunday morning as I was
doing my usual Twitter thing, I found myself growing uncomfortable when faced with
the steady stream of tweets celebrating moms and motherhood. That’s wonderful,
of course, for people who are mothers and who have mothers – they should
celebrate. But then I thought, what about those who don’t ? What about all
those children – young and old alike – who have lost their mothers? How does it
make them feel to be deluged with these reminders of other people’s happy
families when their own has been torn apart?
I hadn’t known ahead of time what I was going to
tweet that day. I had nothing sweet or tender to offer in honor of the holiday,
nothing warm or fuzzy I wanted to say about my mom or anyone else’s. But as I
waded my way through my tweetstream, it suddenly came to me that even if I
didn’t know what I wanted to say, I knew who I wanted to speak to, this
Mother’s Day. Not to the mothers, but to the motherless.
And this is what I posted.
“For all those who can no longer celebrate
#MothersDay… Remember #Mom.”
And then I got up and made breakfast. When I
returned to my computer about an hour later, my tweet had been retweeted 49
times and favorited 70 times.
I was blown away. Needless to say, nothing I have
ever posted on Twitter has ever gotten anything close to that kind of response.
As of this writing, there have been 133 retweets and 152 favorites – mostly by
people with whom I had no prior connection. And people responded! How they
responded. Here are a few of the notes I received:
"I remember my mom too! Its the 1st Mother's Day without her! Be strong, Lori!"
"I put flowers on my mother's grave too. Miss her so much today."
"Thank you. Lovely reminder of our mothers lost too early."
"Thank you Lori. This is a tough day for a lot of us, but this makes it a little easier."
I was moved. Deeply, deeply moved. My tweet – 70
characters and a photo – had actually reached people, hundreds of them; it had
touched them in a brief yet meaningful way. And when you look at the responses
it prompted, it’s apparent that there were different reasons why. Some wanted
to share their own feelings about their own lost mothers. Some wanted to offer
their support to others who might be in pain. And some were merely grateful to
be acknowledged – to be given the recognition that Mother’s Day is not
necessarily a day of celebration for everyone. The responses varied. But at
heart they all stemmed from the same impulse, our unquenchable desire to communicate
our feelings to other humans.
It’s often said that social media is about making
meaningful connections, about developing relationships with individuals you
wouldn’t normally encounter in your local environment. But there’s a different
kind of connection that social media also makes possible. Connecting to
strangers. People with whom you have no real relationship and probably never
will. People with whom you have absolutely nothing in common, except for this –
a shared emotion. A shared feeling, a shared experience. A shared bit of the
humanity that’s common to us all.
In its own strange way, social media unites us.
We’ve all heard of revolutionary movements being organized through Twitter.
We’re all aware of the grassroots activism that’s transpiring every day on the
internet. We all know how social media is changing our lives, how it’s
connecting people all around the world, how it brings people together, how it
makes their voices heard.
And what we’re discovering is that we are not
alone. There are millions upon millions of others just like us, in all the
countries of the world, who are living and loving and laughing and crying and
hurting and dying. We no longer have to be alone with our feelings. We can
touch, and be touched. We can share our sorrow. We can share our pain. We can
find comfort and support in the hearts of strangers. We can find strength in
the swell of humanity that surrounds us, in the knowledge that in some of the
most essential ways, we are not many, but one.
It’s a powerful age. And a beautiful one. For the
first time in history, we can reach out to our fellow humans, all of them. Knowing
that they can respond to us. Knowing that they will reach back.
