The Fragrance That Survived Ordinariness

We hold our mothers to the standard of God. We expect from them unconditional presence, perfect love, the ability to see us fully and never fail us. When they cannot meet that standard, as no human being can, something breaks between us. It doesn’t happen all at once, but in the small accumulations of disappointment and distance.

My mother devoted her life to beauty. She showed up beautiful. She touched her environment with beauty even through the simplest gestures. She made cakes and elaborate dinners and created around others the feeling of something almost transcendent. Beauty was her language and her offering.

Yet, something stood between us. The standard I held her to, higher than any human could bear, created a coldness in me that I carried for years. It was a distance I could not close, and a sadness we both carried.

Bert Hellinger, the founder of Family Constellations, said something that landed in me like a key turning in a lock: we hold our mothers to the expectation of God, and they are ordinary. The work is to release them from that expectation.

When she became ill, I felt sadness, but also a distance I could not name. I understand it now. Somewhere in me, I had placed her too close to the position of God, expecting from her a kind of unconditional wholeness no human being can sustain. But my mother became fragile, ill, and unmistakably human. And I was not fully ready to meet the woman her illness revealed.

To release my mother from the standard of divinity is not to diminish her. It is to finally see her, the woman she actually was: ordinary and extraordinary simultaneously; limited and generous; imperfect and beautiful.

The jasmine plant itself is unremarkable: a simple vine with small white flowers, nothing dramatic, but the fragrance it releases travels further than the flower ever could. You receive it before you find its source. It reaches you invisibly, carried on air, and asking nothing.

My mother loved flowers and beauty. That love pressed through everything she made, offered, and created. I carried it without always knowing it. It became part of my own pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful, shaping how I move through the world now.

To see her ordinariness now is to feel her closer. The coldness drops. The superiority drops. What remains is simpler and more real: a woman who loved beauty and passed it through, imperfectly and faithfully, in the only ways she knew.

This Mother's Day I am not celebrating an ideal. I am honoring a human being. My mother, ordinary and irreplaceable. The jasmine fragrance that traveled further than she knew.