Mothering Without a Mother
Mother’s Day has been a complicated time for me all my life, but especially since I lost my mom. This year will be 20 years since she died…and I will have had as many years without her as I had with her. So from here on out, I will have spent more of my life figuring it out on my own, wishing I could ask her things. More of my life with this giant hole than without it. More of my life trying to remember her details and hoping what I’m remembering is real and not a memory just made from my imagination. More of my life wondering about her secrets and wondering if she would’ve told me them if she had lived longer.
.
Mother’s Day is also complicated for me because it’s also always right near my birthday. This year, my 40th, is on Monday, and it used to be my favorite time of the year until she died. But then seven years ago, I had my own baby just a week before and another layer of complex feelings arose. Having your birthday and Mother’s Day so close is kind of like being born on Christmas…sounds fun until you realize the two will always get lumped together…”Here’s your Mother’s birthday card!” In some ways, it seems fitting to celebrate birthing with Mother’s Day but combining my own birth (and the birthing day of my mother) with the day to celebrate my own motherhood usually builds up the expectations so high that the true experience of the two days ends with a let down…like somehow it was supposed to be those big celebration of me when I have this wound still festering because she’s not here, because she will never meet my kids in this life, because every Mother’s Day she had was always overshadowed by my birthday and I was too young and not enough of a mother yet to notice. Knowing her, that likely never crossed her mind, wanting to put the focus on me instead. But I can’t help but wonder if she secretly hoped for a spa day that never came…and I probably always will.
.
I will only be able to wonder about my mom for the rest of my life and the longer I live, the further I get from the short time I got to spend with her…the more she just becomes a memory…the more people in my life never got to meet her. She died before I met my husband and had kids of my own so all the people I spend day-in-day-out with don’t have grief associated with her loss because she’s always been someone who lived in their imaginations. They never heard her wheezy laugh, the jingle of her keys attached to her handbag, the horrible rattling smoker’s cough that still seizes my own throat to think about…they only know what I’ve told them about her…they only know her as gone.
.
I remember thinking when I was 14 that she probably wouldn’t live long enough to meet my kids (if I ever had them). After thinking that, of course, I felt like a shitty person, but when you live with someone who has so many chronic health problems, financial instability, no health insurance and lifelong depression, it’s hard to imagine a long future for them. She had a stroke when I was 15, and I was so used to her having health problems that went unaddressed, I didn’t know how serious it was and neither did she. She continued to go to work, afraid to tell us something felt really wrong, afraid she’d lose everything if she did. Her coworkers noticed before we did when she arrived to work without her glasses, confused and struggling. I knew something had been wrong but was still too much of a child to force her to go get checked out. It took other adults to convince her to go to the hospital where they looked at me with scorn, saying, “How did you let her get this bad?” I remember thinking, “She’s my mother. I can’t tell her what to do. She’s supposed to tell me what to do…I’m just a kid.” but immediately realizing that my role of being a kid had ended. I would be her parent for the rest of her life.
.
Three years later, after so much prodding from her, I left for college in another state, riddled with guilt for leaving her alone and for feeling relieved at being released from the responsibility. I didn’t know how to be a kid anymore and although I lived it up in college, I always knew I had more to lose than the other students if I fucked up my chance at a different kind of life…the kind I got to choose…the kind that could be easier with less pain and more joy…less struggle and more ease. And so I worked my ass off, building my college major around finding a way to make a living doing what I love…making art and sharing it with people.
.
She died before she saw me achieve that dream. Before I even graduated. I was 834 miles away when she died, but I still knew exactly when it happened. I felt her energy envelop the world like a mushroom cloud and it literally started pouring down rain for weeks afterward. And again, I felt guilty for feeling relived that her struggle was over…that I no longer had to be an unprepared parent to my parent. And my struggle wasn’t nearly over either. The years between then and when my husband came into my life were the hardest I’ve endured so far. Silly me for thinking losing her would be the hardest part.
.
My husband is a quiet man…a stable man…the kind of father you’d see in a sweet movie…and so many days with him I still wonder why he, someone so profoundly whole, hitched his train to mine, someone so profoundly broken… having lived this life so full of pain and fear and loss and struggle. But he did and he celebrates me for my birthday…and for Mother’s Day. He gets a cake and usually flowers and spa days that my mother never even knew existed. And each year as a mother I try to let some of the grief go. Let the pain and fear and loss and struggle leave to open more space for love. It’s hard as hell to remember that healing isn’t linear and there are days I feel like I’m making progress and then days I’m right back there in that hospital getting judged by the doctors for not caring enough about my mom to force her to care for herself…before I even had a driver’s license. My husband didn’t have that kind of childhood, hasn’t had grief like that ever in his life. And so it’s hard for him to understand the complexity in Mother’s Day for me…the complexity with it surrounding my birthday…and how it sometimes feels wrong for me to celebrate when she’s not here to be celebrated. But I’ll eat the cake. Smell the flowers. Get the massage. And try to smile, knowing my kids aren’t having the kind of childhood I did. They just get to eat the cake.
