You Are My Sunshine: A Lullaby for Mothers

It is almost Mother’s Day. This year, I will celebrate that I have been a mom for over a decade. I will honor the various women in my life who have supported and helped me along the way to becoming a mother. I am fortunate to have my amazing grandmother in my life, as well as aunts who supported me throughout my childhood in place of a mom, a wealth of friends who have cared for me and shown me the art of mothering through the years, a stepmom who was on the scene at just the right time, and an incredible mother-in-love who raised one helluva man that I am blessed to call my husband. I recognize that it is an abundant blessing to have so many women in my life that care for me, yet I still feel an absence in that area of my life. I do not have much of a relationship with my own biological mother. Although I rarely speak to her, I think about my mother often.

I have complicated memories of my mother. Many of my memories are confusing, and I have far more questions than answers about her choices throughout my childhood. Many of the memories are painful, frightening or sad. Some of them still cause me to feel angry, or hurt, or disappointed. The memory that causes me the greatest ache, however, is that of my mother singing to me a lullaby. It comes to me in flashes. I can picture myself as a toddler, standing on the side of the crib calling out, and then see her enter the room, lay me down, and bend over the rails while she sings. I can feel myself cradled on her lap, slowly rocking back and forth while she is smoothing my hair to calm me. I think of her sitting on the side of my bed when I had the flu, and the words flood my mind again.

“You are my sunshine,” she sang, “my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. You’ll never know dear, how much I love you, please don’t take my sunshine away.”

It is a song that many mothers sing to their children. I have sung it often to my own. And yet every time I utter the words I hesitate.  My eyes grow wet with unshed tears and my chest aches with pressure as I softly make my way through the chorus, thinking of my mother, thinking of my children.

 I think about my mother rocking me to sleep, looking in on me as her baby at night.  I think how the lyrics to that song were an echo of the life in front of us.  "Please don't take my sunshine away," my mother begged over my sleepy head.  It is the cry of so many of us as mothers when we rock our little ones.  "Don't grow up too fast," we plead.  "Don't leave me too soon," we cry out, when we look up and realize that they have grown inches taller and years wiser.  "Please be mine always," we ask, hoping that even when they do grow up and go away, they will still be our babies.

The chorus of You Are My Sunshine feels like it is part proclamation of love, part codependent threat.  You are my sunshine, so please don't ever leave me, because if you go I will have nothing.   And yet that chorus seems to reflect one aspect of a mother’s love and heartache pretty well. You are my everything, little one. Watching you grow makes the bleakest day seem lovely. You light up my life. I don’t think you can ever really know how much I love you with this powerful love, the love of a mother for her child. And yet, my heart breaks because I know that my greatest responsibility in life is to raise you so that you can go out on your own one day. But not yet, please. Please don’t take my sunshine away just yet.

Perhaps I feel this pull more acutely than some, because I do not have an adult relationship with my mom. I cannot ask her if she felt the same intensity I did on the day we brought our oldest home from the hospital. I was sitting on the side of the bed in our apartment, sunlight streaming through the window, my beaming husband standing over us, proud as could be. I looked up at him with tears pouring down my face. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you in pain?”

Holding my sweet, chubby bundle in my arms, through gasping sobs, I told him what was bothering me. “He’s just going to grow up (sniffle, sob) and meet some girl (gasp), and leave me (boo-hoo-hoo)!” With the patience of a saint, my husband kissed my forehead. “Honey,” he said calmly, “let’s just figure out how to feed this little guy and get through the night. Maybe let’s not worry about the next 18 years just yet.”

But as the years fly by, I feel this tension of motherhood deepen. This love that is so overwhelming is accompanied by a heartache that knows that it cannot hold on to a ray of sunshine forever. That little bundle has places to go, people to meet, and a life of his own to live. And I constantly fear that if I mess this up, my little man may not come back to me after he is grown. Embedded in this ache that accompanies watching my children grow is the deeper ache over my own mother who missed so much of my childhood. Most people never sing the verses of You Are My Sunshine, perhaps because they are heavily coated with sorrow.  My mother always sang the first verse to me.

“The other night dear, as I lay sleeping, I dreamed I held you in my arms. When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken, and so I hung my head and I cried.”

I don’t think my mother could have possibly known how this verse would soon echo in her own life. I can only imagine that those words did become truth when her children were taken from her.  The gray skies of navigating abuse and poverty and brokenness managed to blot out any ray of light for years. I don't believe my mother wanted me to be hurt, but I don't believe that her desire for things to be better acquits her of responsibility.  How do I balance her possible love for me, her daughter, with the terrible and traumatic events that transpired, and her apparent powerlessness to change the course?  There is evidence that my mother asked me repeatedly if I was being hurt; it seems I never felt safe enough to tell her the truth.

My mother only sang the chorus and the first verse to me, that I can recall. But the verses of You Are My Sunshine continue in this way. Once, I dreamed I held you in my arms, but it was only a mirage.  You have left me to love another, and you have shattered all my dreams.  I wonder, is this song about love, or is it about grief?  I love you, the song proclaims, you are everything to me. Don't leave me, the verse threatens, you will regret it.  I love you, come back to me, blame me, I will forgive you.  I cannot decide if this song is a story of love, or a story of loss. Perhaps, as is so often the case, the answer isn't either/or.  Instead, it is both/and.

Motherhood is like that. It is love, and it is grief. It is this intense loss of self, where each day I must find a way to give more and more and more of me over for my children. I must learn how to put their needs before my own, and yet I must also take care of myself just enough that I have the strength to love them well. I must prepare myself for the day when I will allow my children to step outside my love, and consider the grief I may experience. At its core, You Are My Sunshine perfectly conveys the all consuming love that being a mother becomes, along with recognizing the ways in which mothers may endure tremendous loss.

The questions I ask myself about motherhood do not have easy answers. When I think of my mother, it seems easier at times to move forward if I believe that she allowed the abuse in my life to occur because she didn't care, she valued only herself and her own interests.  The harder truth to endure is the belief that most likely she loved me deeply, and the hurt I experienced pained her too.  Our shared sorrow results in our shared brokenness and inability to find our way to reconciliation.  The gray skies take over, the storm is too great, and the sunshine of our connection has all been taken away.

I believe that You Are My Sunshine should be the lullaby for mothers, rather than a song we sing for children. It is the song of mothers whose little ones brighten every day, even though at the same time those women are battling the stormy gray clouds of all that life sets before them. It is also the cry of mothers who lost their babies far too soon, who may wake at night dreaming of their children somehow taken from them. You Are My Sunshine is the chorus of mothers whose babies are grown and walking around without them, mothers who are simultaneously proud and lonely. The song fully reflects the intense love and the overwhelming grief that some stages of motherhood may place into a heart. You Are My Sunshine is my lullaby; it is the song that allows me to feel the weight of mothering and the hope of love that will endure. You Are My Sunshine is the lullaby my own mother sang over me, when she didn’t even realize the depth of its truth.

This Mother’s Day, I choose to remember that my mother sang to me.  I choose to believe that in those moments, the words she sang were true.  I choose to believe that my mother loved me, even if she didn't know how to exercise that love to protect me.  In that belief is more sorrow than comfort, knowing that the choices made years ago have altered our relationship forever.  Still, this Mother’s Day I also choose to keep singing You Are My Sunshine to my children, because it always is both/and. Life will always be both/and, my story will always be both/and, motherhood will always be both/and.  Love and pain, hurt and healing, sunshine and gray skies all tangled up together.

You can listen to a beautiful and true version of You Are My Sunshine performed by The Civil Wars here.