Unhappy Mother's Day

Don't misunderstand me. I am very much in favor of everybody celebrating their mothers and telling them how awesome they are for all they do. I think it is a great thing to appreciate having your mother and I think once a year is far too infrequent to let her know it. I support the concept of Mother's Day and the mass celebration of mothers that it is.

It is just a painful subject for me.

It is impossible as a child to fully mourn the loss of a parent. You can only do the parts of mourning that you are mature enough to comprehend. At five or six years old, I could not understand fully what it meant for my mother to be fatally ill or that the times she spent in the hospital were abnormal and that most kids didn't sit in hospital lobbies while the adults visited their mothers (and failed to understand that they, too, needed to visit). I understood that time with my mother was limited, that her being home with me was special and that getting to see her was precious. I loved her dearly in all of the ways that a five- or six- year old can love.

However, I could not mourn the difference between the innate, unconditional, supportive love of a mother and the obligatory very conditional fondness from a mother-substitute. I did not yet really comprehend the loss. I was not at a loss for mother-substitutes. There were many who gave all they could to try to be what I was missing and, honestly, my two amazing grandmothers did much to keep me from ever missing it during childhood and adolescence, God rest their souls. In fact, it was their deaths within less than five months if each other in 2004 that made me really get to the point where I began to see - and mourn - many of the things I was not able to comprehend fully at age seven when my mother finally died. Not to mention the man that is, without a doubt, the best father on earth.

Before recent years, before full adult recognition of that loss, Before that loss was also paired with the loss of the two women that stood in my mother's stead and before my father (awesome, but fallible) began insisting that I put my stepmother in my mother's place, Mother's Day was not half so painful. It was just another Father's Day - another day to recognize the man who was both mother and father to me. However, for all those reasons, it has now become a day of mourning, in addition to those other days that my mother's loss and my motherless childhood, adolescence and young adulthood become palpable.

So don't get me wrong. I want all of you to let your mothers know how precious they are. I appreciate all of the women who have tried their very best to give me what I am missing - including my stepmother. I want them all to know it. I honor every mother out there who does for her children those things that fate robbed my mother the opportunity to do...

...but I still mourn.

originally published on posterous.com

Watching Death

Today, I went to do my daily one mile run in the gym. When I arrived, there was a woman there with very, very short hair using the elliptical machine. I can't fully explain how I knew, but I immediately knew that she is either currently fighting or recently recovering from cancer. Of course, the hair is the most obvious clue, since the loss of hair is one of the most well known of the side-effects of chemotherapy.

That actually wasn't what stood out to me, though. She was wearing a baseball cap and what I first noticed, instead, was her labored movement. Movement that said "My body is not healthy and I have to use a lot of energy to do what healthy people do easily.". Movement that I recognized very well after nine-and-a-half years of being a stroke survivor. (If you haven't already been introduced to Catherine Miserandino's "The Spoon Theory", I suggest you read it.) This "spoonie" recognized a fellow "spoonie" immediately and only later did I recognize the signs of specifically which illness she battles.

After fighting the urge to cheer her on, I started thinking of my mother, who died almost 25 years ago and I began to remember things like my dad teaching me "Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a Bear" and having me proudly show off my new poem to my mother, who lay in bed weak and hairless from chemotherapy (my dad's twisted sense of humor is an entire topic of its own) and my mother so sick she had lost her hearing and didn't always recognize me any more.

Someone recently said that it had never occurred to them that when I say "My mom died when I was seven" that it means that I watched her get sicker and deteriorate for years before she actually died. They didn't grasp before things like being five or so and wanting to climb in the hospital bed with my mother but having well-meaning adults shoo me away or having my mother home from the hospital as a child being like a special guest visiting instead of just a normal day. They never realized that the traumatic part was the years before she actually left this earth.

Honestly, I never really thought of it that way either. In a lot of ways, that was my entire conception of having a mother. Most of the normal parts of having a mom happened when I was at an age before my memories start. I never really thought about the fact that almost every memory of my mother that I didn't get secondhand from someone else is an unusual and traumatic one.

I've always - or at least since the age of seven - had a bit of a barrier. I like people and enjoy being around them, but a select few are extremely close to me and permanently have my love and affection. My husband calls all these other people my "crushes" because I like them, but my adoration is fleeting. I have always thought this was a result if my mother's death. Today, for the first time, I realize that it is probably the long process of observing death that erected that barrier. Though that long process prepared me unbelievably well for my mother's actual death, it made it so much harder for me to let in people I didn't already love before her death.

I've always immensely admired every decision she made during those years (and her ability to laugh at the "Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a Bear thing), emulated her grace when I face my own trials and illness and thought I would imitate her if ever faced with preparing my own children for my death. Now, for the first time, I find myself questioning something she did. Though it helped me deal with death at seven, did it have permanent effects that I never fully realized?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Colorado Springs, United States

Mr. Mom

Yesterday, I had a conversation with my father. It was a really good one where, even though I was crying and pouring my heart out and being all mushy, he really was supportive and awesome!!! It was one if those rare times when, even though I was hurting and needing the comforting of a mother, I didn't feel the loss of mine. My father was my mother yesterday and it was absolutely amazing. Sometimes, that man is awesome!!!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Colorado Springs,United States