I have struggled with this post for days.
It concerns a very intimate pain in my life, one that has shaped the person I am today. It's emotionally intense, consider yourself warned.
Mother's day has always been a holiday of mixed feelings. Now with two children of my own, this emotional mess has reached critical mass.
The summer I turned 8, I lost my mother to organ failure. Her death was sudden and slow in the same breath, she grew sick and passed within a week, her final days spent in a hospital as her body stopped working a piece at a time. It was a terrible reaction to a pain medication, it blind sided our family, leaving behind her husband and daughter.
My memories of this time are fractured and nightmarish. I remember the night my father came home, awake to hear my uncle's girlfriend ran past my room sobbing. I crept down the hall to find her crying in the dark guest room and when she pulled me into her arms, I knew. The revelation punched a hole in my heart, I just lost one the most important people in my life.
Grief is a tangible presence, it hangs over you, clouding your personal light, and it's form and focus shift as you grow older. At first, her loss drove a spike through me, I ached for her down to my bones. It wasn't until I went back to school the anger hit. Kids can be unintentionally cruel. Ignorance and unease can also make them incredibly mean. In the space of a month, I became an outcast, the crybaby, something was wrong with me because I had no mother. My peers did not know how to react to this, they lashed out with cruel words and cold shoulders. Hurt and Anger stayed with me for a long time.
My father met the woman who is now my step mother when I was 10 years old.
In retrospect, the relationship to my step mother is a complex tapestry we have spent years piecing together. She had grown two children of her own, and while it's rather easy to graft a new spouse onto an established family, it is far more difficult to add a younger child into the mix. The difficulties I had in forging a relationship with my step mother fall on both sides of the fence. I don't want to talk about them. I have dwelt on the bitterness and resentment that bled from my attempts to form a maternal bond with my step mother long enough. I will be 30 in two years and I still call her by her first name as often as I allow myself to call her 'Mom'.
I do call her on Mother's day, of course I do, despite our struggles and pitfalls, she has been a crucial part of my life, and she pulled my father from the dark pit my mother's death put him in. I will always be grateful to her for the love she has given my family.
But I know I do not have that maternal bond with her. It is a bond I have sought my entire life. I see it in the strong friendships I have with older women in my female circle, trying to fill a hole that feels bottomless.
My memories of my mother consist of her absence more than her presence.
I remember all the times I spent crying on the floor of my bedroom, wishing for nothing more than her arms around me. I remember milestones in my development where I needed her advice desperately. Health class aside, it took my years not to view my menstruation cycle with shame. How do I deal with crushes? How do I deal with cliques, and still be myself? I remember her not taking pictures of me when I attended my first dance, of her not warning me to be safe with my dates. I remember her not being at my high school graduation, or my college one.
I remember her not being there to see my babies when they were born.
But my greatest heartbreak, is I cannot remember her face.
I am afraid I will have trouble keeping a maternal bond with my children as they grow older, or that my bond with them is defective. I fear dying on my children. I cannot dwell on my mortality without dissolving into a shuddering bundle of nerves. I refuse to let these fears take over the memory of my mother.
Her loss is a pillar of my personality. You may not consider this a positive thing but I have come to see it that way. My mother encouraged my imagination and creativity until the end of her days, my imagination has become my solace, my power. From my imagination, I drew the strength to survive. I became a storyteller, a weaver of destinies, taking life into my inked up hands. From the loss of my mother, I became strong through struggle, hardened by adversity. I am still a weeper, I cry when I am angry, but I will survive whatever you throw at me. I have pulled myself out of deep depression over and over because my mother gave me a fierce will to live. Her loss has made me treasure each female friendship I have, they may have not filled the hole in my heart but they have formed the bandage over it. Even with great distance between us or swamped by the busy chaos of day to day living, I think of my ladies all the time.
Mother's day, truthfully any holiday, draws out the contemplation of the woman who gave me life, and whose absence I keenly continue to feel. My children are still young and I know they will grow up feeling the love of my husband's family, and my beautifully imperfect sewn together family. They will call my step mother 'grandma' and I am confidant she will love them as fiercely as she loves her other grandchildren. And as I sit here, typing with my son asleep against my chest, I know under all those irrational fears I have of being a flawed mother, I will be perfect for my children.
Someday, I will sit my children down and tell them the story of their other grandmother, the woman whose absence has become a presence in itself. I will tell them of the woman who shaped and influenced the person I am even though she couldn't be there.
My mother is a hole in my heart. It's been over twenty since her passing. This hole has never closed. Year after year, I have slowly filled this hole from the bottom up with memory, tears, dreams, love, and hope. It's not full yet, I don't know if it ever will be, but it is a part of me, a part I have finally accepted for the negative and the positive.
Happy Mother's Day, Mom.
