This second Mother’s Day…is harder than the first. I think it’s because you prepare yourself for all the “Firsts”. My first birthday without Mom, Christmas without Mom, her first birthday without…her, and the first Mother’s Day sans a mother to hug and say, “You are the best mom E-ver!”
While this second one, well, it just snuck up on me. Then without warning, there was a 1-800-FLOWERS email in my in-box: “Nothing says ‘I love you, Mom!’ Like 10 billion roses!”
And you suck in your breath for one…long…moment…
Ah, it’s Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day. Hi Mom! (because I do talk to her when she reminds me to do so from beyond). Hi Mom…Mom. Crap, Mom. Arrrrgh. Mom. Stop laughing at me, I can feel it. You know this sucks. Especially now…without you…with everything that is changing and moving and growing and going-to-pot and simultaneously turning out wonderfully. But you aren’t here to see me through it all. I’m becoming that woman, that woman you really wanted me to be. Did you really have to help me get here from that vantage point? Instead of right here? Right here where I could grasp your small, soft hand with my strong hand and say, as I always did, “sheesh, I sure do have Dad’s hands. Yours are so delicate.”
As the day comes upon me, though, after this past couple weeks of massive media marketing for mom paraphernalia, I find that my heart is stilled and my breath is released just a little. Something quite amazing became apparent to me over this past year. Really not imagining it was possible, but I’ve come to love my mother even more. This is because I was able to see her perspective on me, as her daughter, thus forming a better understanding of who she was as my mother and as a woman.
I was shocked into a feeling that I’ve never felt before when my nephew fell down mighty hard in front of me on a jungle gym we were scaling. The endless moment between seeing him lose his grip and then his little body fall to the platform is something that plays in my head at least once a week. There was another moment, then, after he landed when his brain finally synapsed into assessment of the situation and his mind and body felt the shock and pain of it all. His face was already turned up towards mine - probably hurling down towards him, though I don’t remember how I got next to him, and his facial expression and subsequent wail was enough to make me literally want to pass out. It was at that moment that I finally understood my mother more fully than I ever have before.
One way I always described my mother was “fearful”. She expressed a lot of fear when it came to doing many things, especially if they were new. Fear of what could happen, how you could get hurt, how some person would respond; I mistakenly saw this as a great weakness and worked hard throughout my life to overcome, if not the feeling of fear, at least the inability to act from fear or react in a positive way. It was, and is, a daily challenge because, well, I was raised by the woman. “What ifs” were ingrained in me. I see the difference between my “what ifs” and Mom’s “what ifs”, however. Mine stem from fear of failure, of inadequacy, of missing the mark on my goals. Mom’s “what ifs” stemmed from fear for those she loved most. And I was her baby girl, the essence of herself, the “She” she had wanted to be.
Mom distinctly told me one time that she had made a conscious effort to raise me just the opposite of how her mother had raised her. I didn’t know my grandmother, who died when I was 6, but the gist is that she was a feisty Italian American woman, having married late and birthed late with just my mom. Grandma had a drunk for a brother, probably mafia-connected so the rumor has it, a paranoid-schizophrenic sister, and a whole bunch of other siblings with some interesting personalities (11 total). It came down to the fact that she controlled my mother thoroughly. Mom also went to full-out Catholic girl’s school where the nuns did actually rap knuckles. So my mom’s world had no “what ifs” whatsoever for her to decide on. Imagine the challenge, then, of raising your daughter to be self-sufficient and independent when you, yourself, were not familiar with how that girl’s life would unfold.
But unfold it did…and she let me live it. There are many stories that could be told here, about the constant ebb and flow of my mother’s care that unconsciously puzzled me, because I was so independent yet trapped at the same time to bring up “what ifs” that created tiny balls of fear in my mind. What if I didn’t win, what if I couldn’t do it, what if I dated him, what if it just all fell through? The most poignant example of Mom overcoming her fear, though, is when she let me go away to many foreign lands.
Puerto Rico at 18 to meet my dad, as he was assigned there for hurricane relief efforts; she couldn’t understand how easy it was for me to fly off on my own to this distant island. Then I went to Russia for three weeks as a college freshman; we were supposedly some of the first tourists to set foot in Siberia after the Soviet Union collapsed. I was so excited but her trepidation always took some fun out of the beginning of my events. “Stop being so afraid,” I would always think. Next there was a trip with Dad and my grandfather to Finland at the end of college – she had “what ifs” ready for all of us. Shortly thereafter, I truly took off, for my first job after graduation to Mesa, Arizona. You would have thought it was also Siberia, instead of suburbia USA. “I just wish you would find a nice man, and settle down.” Huh? I thought as I looked 10 yards away at my boyfriend who was moving out with me. Ah, but you see, he was from Malaysia…so the threat of my skipping off to a foreign land again was very real. And this was not her idea of a “nice guy.” I never got to Malaysia.
Africa, though, I got to Africa next. This is it. This is where, when I look back over the events leading up to my next escape, I can see now how her fears were solely out of the deepest love for me. Not that I doubted it then. What I mean is that I see now the extreme sacrifice she was making in her own well-being by letting her only daughter, her youngest child, at 24 years old, go to the second poorest country in all of the African continent. To live in the bush by herself. In the Sub-Saharan desert, mind you – who lets their daughter do that? Brave, brave mothers, that’s who.
As I stood helplessly, and nauseously, by while my brother assessed my nephew in a fetal position, I replayed in my mind what I could have done differently. Should I have let him climb there, could I have been closer, why didn’t I react fast enough to grab him…? What-ifs. After weeks of thinking those same things and also contemplating all the climbing my mother let me do and the falls she watched me take, I saw her for the first time. Because I saw it in me. Her fear was no weakness, just the deepest love possible. She didn’t stop me when I was headed for that ledge on the jungle gym when I exclaimed, “Oh! I’ve never tried this side before!” Mom reined in her fear just enough to let me go well beyond her comfort zone and sometimes into a very real dread for my life. She was so strong. I am sad that I did not learn this when she was alive. Now I understand my mother and I feel for her, I am her. I love her more and more beyond her death.
My nephew was fine, by the way. He needed to be held for a good half hour by his mom, but then was able to jog to the elevator so we could freshen up and get down to the fire pit for toasting marshmallows. I can’t say that I’m fine. I’m a mom but not a mom. I’ve got that mom-feeling ability that I wasn’t really prepared for, so I’m trying to figure out how to use it wisely. Luckily, I realized, too, that a key piece to Mom’s “what if” puzzle was her faith in God. With my own journey, I’ve been able to discover how incredibly faithful my mom was in trusting God’s plan. I read her diaries after her death and this was the central theme after each post. She wrote or mentioned a bible verse and always, always asked God for strength and direction. This was her peace, I’m sure, in the middle of the night when her daughter was thousands of miles away. She simply knew that she could rely on God in the end, despite her fears. She accepted whatever the consequences would be, whatever answers God gave her because she was brave enough to trust him fully.
It is now turning, as I write, the second Mother’s Day without Mom. It’s just a day. Each of these days is now without Mom. But I feel her. And she helps me write about her. To share her. To share me. And to tell you all, those with your mother on this earth, to grab her hand today and caress it and look at it and notice if you have some characteristics in your hands that are from hers. Most of all, look at her and see her. See her for the mother to you that she is, and most of all for the woman that she is. You lucky, lucky people.
While this second one, well, it just snuck up on me. Then without warning, there was a 1-800-FLOWERS email in my in-box: “Nothing says ‘I love you, Mom!’ Like 10 billion roses!”
And you suck in your breath for one…long…moment…
Ah, it’s Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day. Hi Mom! (because I do talk to her when she reminds me to do so from beyond). Hi Mom…Mom. Crap, Mom. Arrrrgh. Mom. Stop laughing at me, I can feel it. You know this sucks. Especially now…without you…with everything that is changing and moving and growing and going-to-pot and simultaneously turning out wonderfully. But you aren’t here to see me through it all. I’m becoming that woman, that woman you really wanted me to be. Did you really have to help me get here from that vantage point? Instead of right here? Right here where I could grasp your small, soft hand with my strong hand and say, as I always did, “sheesh, I sure do have Dad’s hands. Yours are so delicate.”
As the day comes upon me, though, after this past couple weeks of massive media marketing for mom paraphernalia, I find that my heart is stilled and my breath is released just a little. Something quite amazing became apparent to me over this past year. Really not imagining it was possible, but I’ve come to love my mother even more. This is because I was able to see her perspective on me, as her daughter, thus forming a better understanding of who she was as my mother and as a woman.
I was shocked into a feeling that I’ve never felt before when my nephew fell down mighty hard in front of me on a jungle gym we were scaling. The endless moment between seeing him lose his grip and then his little body fall to the platform is something that plays in my head at least once a week. There was another moment, then, after he landed when his brain finally synapsed into assessment of the situation and his mind and body felt the shock and pain of it all. His face was already turned up towards mine - probably hurling down towards him, though I don’t remember how I got next to him, and his facial expression and subsequent wail was enough to make me literally want to pass out. It was at that moment that I finally understood my mother more fully than I ever have before.
One way I always described my mother was “fearful”. She expressed a lot of fear when it came to doing many things, especially if they were new. Fear of what could happen, how you could get hurt, how some person would respond; I mistakenly saw this as a great weakness and worked hard throughout my life to overcome, if not the feeling of fear, at least the inability to act from fear or react in a positive way. It was, and is, a daily challenge because, well, I was raised by the woman. “What ifs” were ingrained in me. I see the difference between my “what ifs” and Mom’s “what ifs”, however. Mine stem from fear of failure, of inadequacy, of missing the mark on my goals. Mom’s “what ifs” stemmed from fear for those she loved most. And I was her baby girl, the essence of herself, the “She” she had wanted to be.
Mom distinctly told me one time that she had made a conscious effort to raise me just the opposite of how her mother had raised her. I didn’t know my grandmother, who died when I was 6, but the gist is that she was a feisty Italian American woman, having married late and birthed late with just my mom. Grandma had a drunk for a brother, probably mafia-connected so the rumor has it, a paranoid-schizophrenic sister, and a whole bunch of other siblings with some interesting personalities (11 total). It came down to the fact that she controlled my mother thoroughly. Mom also went to full-out Catholic girl’s school where the nuns did actually rap knuckles. So my mom’s world had no “what ifs” whatsoever for her to decide on. Imagine the challenge, then, of raising your daughter to be self-sufficient and independent when you, yourself, were not familiar with how that girl’s life would unfold.
But unfold it did…and she let me live it. There are many stories that could be told here, about the constant ebb and flow of my mother’s care that unconsciously puzzled me, because I was so independent yet trapped at the same time to bring up “what ifs” that created tiny balls of fear in my mind. What if I didn’t win, what if I couldn’t do it, what if I dated him, what if it just all fell through? The most poignant example of Mom overcoming her fear, though, is when she let me go away to many foreign lands.
Puerto Rico at 18 to meet my dad, as he was assigned there for hurricane relief efforts; she couldn’t understand how easy it was for me to fly off on my own to this distant island. Then I went to Russia for three weeks as a college freshman; we were supposedly some of the first tourists to set foot in Siberia after the Soviet Union collapsed. I was so excited but her trepidation always took some fun out of the beginning of my events. “Stop being so afraid,” I would always think. Next there was a trip with Dad and my grandfather to Finland at the end of college – she had “what ifs” ready for all of us. Shortly thereafter, I truly took off, for my first job after graduation to Mesa, Arizona. You would have thought it was also Siberia, instead of suburbia USA. “I just wish you would find a nice man, and settle down.” Huh? I thought as I looked 10 yards away at my boyfriend who was moving out with me. Ah, but you see, he was from Malaysia…so the threat of my skipping off to a foreign land again was very real. And this was not her idea of a “nice guy.” I never got to Malaysia.
Africa, though, I got to Africa next. This is it. This is where, when I look back over the events leading up to my next escape, I can see now how her fears were solely out of the deepest love for me. Not that I doubted it then. What I mean is that I see now the extreme sacrifice she was making in her own well-being by letting her only daughter, her youngest child, at 24 years old, go to the second poorest country in all of the African continent. To live in the bush by herself. In the Sub-Saharan desert, mind you – who lets their daughter do that? Brave, brave mothers, that’s who.
As I stood helplessly, and nauseously, by while my brother assessed my nephew in a fetal position, I replayed in my mind what I could have done differently. Should I have let him climb there, could I have been closer, why didn’t I react fast enough to grab him…? What-ifs. After weeks of thinking those same things and also contemplating all the climbing my mother let me do and the falls she watched me take, I saw her for the first time. Because I saw it in me. Her fear was no weakness, just the deepest love possible. She didn’t stop me when I was headed for that ledge on the jungle gym when I exclaimed, “Oh! I’ve never tried this side before!” Mom reined in her fear just enough to let me go well beyond her comfort zone and sometimes into a very real dread for my life. She was so strong. I am sad that I did not learn this when she was alive. Now I understand my mother and I feel for her, I am her. I love her more and more beyond her death.
My nephew was fine, by the way. He needed to be held for a good half hour by his mom, but then was able to jog to the elevator so we could freshen up and get down to the fire pit for toasting marshmallows. I can’t say that I’m fine. I’m a mom but not a mom. I’ve got that mom-feeling ability that I wasn’t really prepared for, so I’m trying to figure out how to use it wisely. Luckily, I realized, too, that a key piece to Mom’s “what if” puzzle was her faith in God. With my own journey, I’ve been able to discover how incredibly faithful my mom was in trusting God’s plan. I read her diaries after her death and this was the central theme after each post. She wrote or mentioned a bible verse and always, always asked God for strength and direction. This was her peace, I’m sure, in the middle of the night when her daughter was thousands of miles away. She simply knew that she could rely on God in the end, despite her fears. She accepted whatever the consequences would be, whatever answers God gave her because she was brave enough to trust him fully.
It is now turning, as I write, the second Mother’s Day without Mom. It’s just a day. Each of these days is now without Mom. But I feel her. And she helps me write about her. To share her. To share me. And to tell you all, those with your mother on this earth, to grab her hand today and caress it and look at it and notice if you have some characteristics in your hands that are from hers. Most of all, look at her and see her. See her for the mother to you that she is, and most of all for the woman that she is. You lucky, lucky people.
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