When I was three years old, my mother emptied out a closet in our small apartment — the only space we could spare — and made me a reading room.  It was my father's closet, filled with tools, lightbulbs, spare batteries, testosterone, but she tossed the man stuff out, installed a tiny table and two chairs she'd found at a flea market, and christened the closet my "first school."

Not able to afford fancy classroom materials, she cut words and pictures out of old magazines and greeting cards, and Scotch-taped these colorful scraps of paper to the closet walls.  I remember she took great care in arranging those scraps, setting them against each other as an artist might set the pieces of a collage.  

When the room was ready, my education began.  Every morning after breakfast, we would sit together at the tiny table, surrounded on all sides by my mother's word-and-picture tapestry.  She would point and I would read, matching pictures to letters, symbols to meaning.  Kitten, puppy, horse, rainbow.  Star, ball, leaf, sun.  Our bodies pressed together, her gaze guiding mine, we feasted on words. 

As soon as I mastered one set of images and letters, she'd replace them with new ones — often late at night, so I wouldn't see the transformation until it was complete the next morning.  I remember feeling as if the walls were alive and magical — an organic, ever-changing picture book.  Fence, cloud, table, pen.  Girl, boy, rock, tree. 

By the time I turned four, my mother's project had succeeded; I was both a bookworm and a self-proclaimed writer.  I'd write poems and stories in black-and-white composition notebooks, and illustrate my masterpieces with Crayola crayons.  I'd disappear the second my mother walked me into Woolworth's or Kmart, running straight to the children’s book display to choose a new Little Golden Book.  The Tawny Scrawny Lion. The Little Tugboat.  The Poky Puppy.  Regardless of our family's financial constraints, my mother always allowed me to buy one more book, one more notebook, one more set of colored pencils.

Trained as a high school teacher back in India, she was also keen to teach me "factual" things, so she read aloud to me in my closet classroom.  We read from The Book of Knowledge\— an encyclopedia set with red covers and oily-smooth pages which smelled delicious.  Later, she had me memorize the preamble to the Constitution, The Gettysburg Address, a few dozen Psalms, and 1st Corinthians 13.  The Love Chapter.

"A word after a word after a word is power," Margaret Atwood writes in her poem "Spelling."  I didn't know it when I was three, but what my mother gave me in that makeshift schoolhouse was my first power.  The power to shape language.  The power to name, declare, describe, and explore.  The power to self-express.

This weekend, we celebrate Mother's Day, a holiday (I'll confess) I've approached with ambivalence for some years now.  Not because I don't want to honor mothers — I definitely do.  But because the syrupy Hallmark sentiment that governs the day doesn't tell the truth about me and my mother.

The power my mother gave me all those years ago was not straightforward.  Language is never a benign thing, and in immigrant families in particular it has great power to wound and divide.  It didn't take me long, as a child, to grab my mother's gift — the gift of English, the gift of a language that is not her mother-tongue — and run away with it.  Before long, I was more fluent and versatile in the language than she was.  By kindergarten, I no longer spoke with her Indian accent.  By adolescence, I considered my "Americanness" and her "Indianness" mutually exclusive.  Literally and figuratively, we reached a point where we just couldn't figure out how to speak the same language.  Though both of us longed to.

I wonder now if this is the most amazing and most terrible thing one can say about a mother's good gifts.  The best gifts are costly.  They wound.  They send a child away.  My mother's closet classroom launched my life in America.  But once the journey started, my words took me to places my mother could not follow. 

A few years ago, when my own daughter was just starting to form words, my mother suffered a stroke.  Supposedly it was mild as strokes go, but in the time that has passed since then, I have witnessed an eerie and unbearable decline — the steady loss of much that was once beautiful and formidable.  These days, my mother hesitates to use words; her stroke-induced hearing loss shames and silences her.  She slips unconsciously out of one language into another, not realizing that her English-language listeners can't comprehend her mother-tongue.  Sometimes, her memory trips her up, and she repeats words.  Or I do, because she forgets what I have just told her.

I know that every single way in which children lose their mothers is agony.  There's no hierarchy, no "better" or "easier" way.  But I didn't think I would lose my mom like this.  We started with words.  Words, power, magic.  A word after a word after a word.  I didn't think I would lose her like this.

But then, I also didn't think I would circle back to so much gratitude, so much complicated love.  On this Mother's Day, I celebrate the woman who gave me words, and loved me as bravely as she could when those words carried me far away.  I also celebrate the woman who taught me that words exist to nourish faith — my lasting sustenance on this journey.  God as Logos.  "In the beginning was the Word."

To this day, I know of no food and drink more essential to my spiritual life than reading and writing.  When I can't pray, I write, and the writing becomes prayer.  When I need God, I reach for a bookshelf.  When every other tool or resource I know of fails, I come crawling back to words — my first solace, my first power — and somehow or other, in their own mysterious ways, they bear me up.  

My mother cannot understand this now, but when she gave me words, she gave me God.  What a gift, and what a giver.  I miss her.