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