A mother’s day poem

It is traditional for me to read something from my daughter at the Mommy N Me Tea and I will do that again this year. I wrote it out here so you can see it while you hear it and ponder its deep meaning. Enjoy. Happy Mother’s Day to all our beautiful Moms at Foundations Montessori Preschool. May you find a new freedom in this time you have with your precious children and find your own path to a deep, meaningful life!

It seemed that growing up meant fitting into boxes.

Here and there I was lucky enough to choose a few boxes I felt comfortable in.

Mostly, they would tell me what boxes I belonged in, and I would cut off my corners until I fit.

They build the boxes, the faceless “they” that speak with the voice of authority. They claim to have the answers, clear and tidy, to the unruly questions of being human. Do this, not like that. Be this, or you are that. These are the rules to be followed. They promise success in exchange for conformity; they wield threats of disaster to chasten those who will not submit. This is success, that is failure: more tiny tiny boxes.

Society says they will love you – as long as you stay in the box. By the time we grow up most of us have forgotten the world outside those claustrophobic spaces, beyond their rules and definitions and expectations. We willingly crush ourselves smaller. We become contortionists for the sake of that which is not happiness, is not success, is not love.

But you and I, we were made to breather deep, to reach for the horizon, to run the endless roads. We do not shrink from the unknown. We flourish in the unbounded joy of the wide wide world.

- Allana Bianco, October 21, 2019