Motherless Mother
My first mother's day without my mom, and why remembering her helps me better understand the work I want and need to do with my own child.
Shortly after I’d hung up the phone after telling my mom I was pregnant she called me back. I was still standing in my kitchen, leaning against the counter, my stomach finally settled from what I remember was a mix of nervousness and excitement.
“I just had to call and tell you that I haven’t stopped smiling,” she confessed.
My relationship with my mother has always been close and complicated.
Not any more complex than any other meaningful relationship, I should be clear. Is fully loving and knowing another human being even possible without some tension existing?
We, all of us, bump up and against one another, refining our sense of ourselves in both the sharpness and softness of others. Coming into being is not and never has been a solitary act.
We are born in need of community.
As I get older, some of what I’ve come to despise most about modern culture is our insistence that deeply caring for one another, whether connected in family or friendship or complete strangers, is somehow a shortcoming instead of a strength.
For my mom, though, I was always (subconsciously) more interested in being who I thought she needed me to be versus developing my own idea of myself. Psychologists would probably have a field day studying all the ways in which my adolescence was marked more by a deepening imprint than honest individuation.
Interestingly, and maybe only to me, looking back I see my mom, too, was giving herself over, constantly creating space for everyone but herself. When my dad remembers her now, he consistently places how much he misses her in context of her use to him. Sounds crude and vulgar—because it is, honestly—but I’m not sure how else to interpret the sentiment in this sentence, which I’ve heard more than once from him during mourning: “I never realized how much she did for me.”
He doesn’t talk about how she could coax life from almost anything, like the gardenia plants she would buy every spring that would have at least one near-death experience per season before blooming for her. Or the way she talked about getting her hands in the dirt every year, itching to get her roses pruned and her garden cleaned up.
Even before being diagnosed with the chronic illness that limits his mobility today, my dad didn’t spend any time with her at the local greenhouses. We’d go every year, me pointing to beautiful flowers and asking “What about this one?” and her usually answering me “That’s a perennial.” (Because we were looking for annuals).
Does he know how peaceful she found the arboretum, her face serene as we’d walk the rows in silence. Does he remember how amazed she was one February when she’d gotten a tip that there were gobs of bald eagles at the lock and dam so we hopped in the car and drove down? (We were not disappointed). We visited almost every morning the entire month until the weather started to warm and they headed further North.
He doesn’t talk about the ways she’d grow cilantro every year for me, even though I lived three hours away, or how we’d usually buy two basil plants and talk about making pesto, “It freezes so nice!,” only to have the plants go to seed with only a single batch made.
A few days after she’d died, he noted how he hadn’t given her enough credit for all she did for him, like she was an employee who’d been passed over for a promotion instead of an autonomous human being with a life of her own, separate from him and wonderful if underdeveloped and unrealized because of life circumstances.
There are circumstances that shape my life, too. I don’t think that’s something any of us can avoid. As with my own mother, the experiences that make me who I am as a person also shape who I am as a mother.
As I sit with my own grief, I also grapple with how my son will think of me after I’m gone, as well as how he thinks of me now. I am marked by both great fortune and great tragedy, the love of my life buried young, the subsequent years lost, at least in part, to a return to simple usefulness instead self-possession.
I worked hard at the time to rebuild my ability to tap into my tenderness. I wanted to broaden my capacity for love. I didn’t want to stop weaving myself into the world.
But I couldn’t quite shake the trauma. I couldn’t quite inch past the part of myself that too often imagines the worst whenever my son is a few minutes late or doesn’t pick up his phone. He grew up basking in both the heart I grew instead of stunted and the shadow of my too-easily-agitated unease.
An impossible place, really. Like me, he instinctually plays the role of caregiver, though we approach the work differently.
Once, while visiting my parents in Florida during a holiday break my senior year of college, I raced out of the car after my parents continued to ask me how my applications to graduate school were going. My dad was fascinated with having a child with a doctorate degree. “So, people will call you Dr.?” he used to ask me during every discussion of post-graduate work.
Instead of telling them I wasn’t really interested in going to graduate school, that I was probably at the beginning of what would become a clinical depression, I lied until lying wasn’t workable. Miserably collecting applications I’d only half-heartedly fill out, and rarely to the end. Asking professors for letters of recommendation. Visiting the registrar to collect transcripts.
My son doesn’t want to worry me, so when I ask after his grades, his scholarship dependent on a B average I know is becoming increasingly unlikely, he rattles off generic percentages like “mid-80s” and “low-90s” in an attempt to suggest my apprehension is unnecessary.
Until the phone call that mirrors my own bolting from my parents’ car where he confesses losing his nanny (my mother and one of his best friends) tanked his mental health and the second semester will end about as poorly as the first.
We go round and round, as we have for most of his life, stuck in what feels like an intractable pattern that is, ironically, grounded in a deep love and an abiding desire to save me from myself.
How do we free ourselves? How do we find our way back or to a place where we understand we can tell one another and love each other through hard truths?
Before my mom died, we were having frank conversations about our own buried truths. She told me one night how surprised she was that I’d married my ex-husband. “I knew you weren’t excited when he proposed,” she told me. “I should have said something.”
She went on to ask me why I stayed with someone who treated me so poorly, having been witness to verbal abuse and other bad behavior.
“Where do you think I learned that?”
She didn’t know, and when I told her from watching her, she moved on fast.
What might sound like bitterness was actually me reaching for her in a more honest and authentic way. I wanted the hard truths between us out in the open. No more raking darkness over the most complicated and vulnerable parts of ourselves that both connected us and caged us.
“You allow dad to get away with everything,” I tell her. “You do everything for him and he gets to treat you however he feels.” I’m angry and scared at once because I know she hasn’t been feeling well and something about our conversations feels both urgent and unnecessary.
She hints at being too old to change. But my son came out as trans when he was 10 and my mother, then 73 and having zero idea of what being trans actually meant, was his staunchest ally from the start. “There is no such thing as too late,” I remind her.
My grief for my mom is tangled with a realization that the dynamic we had for most of my life is being repeated with my son. The hard truths that need telling are different, but the outcomes are similar if not indistinguishable.
Just as I unknowingly became like an extension of my mom, absorbing the overflow, working to make the lives of the people closest to her easier so they, in turn, would make her life easier, my son looks for ways to ease the pressure he knows is too often lurking just beneath.
In the effort to sustain equilibrium, we’re both missing out on the opportunity to deepen our relationship. There is real beauty in rocking the boot, even when your stomach churns and your knuckles and face go white.
Losing my mother in the midst of what were some pretty transformative conversations has reinforced what has been scratching at the back of my brain for a few years: I don’t want the same for me and my son.
I loved my mom completely, but I didn’t know her completely, in part because she never took the time to know herself completely.
I think that’s actually pretty common for mothers. We stretch and stretch and stretch, losing some of ourselves, too tired, maybe, or too busy to take the time to really ask ourselves who we are and, more importantly, who we want to be.
Self-actualization, at least in part, is a selfish endeavor.
But in the ways mothers and their children do, my mom and I were muddling through, guiding one another to fuller versions of both ourselves and our relationship, mother/daughter, friend, confidante.
It’s work we should have started earlier. It’s also work I’ll continue doing with my own child, not only for him, but for me, too.