Filed under: My mother
please don’t take my sunshine away
writing this in my head, hours before i have a chance, or even the will to post it - i think to myself “i want this to be the one.”i want this to be the one that makes you realize how amazing she was.
i want this to be the one that makes you all regret not knowing her.
i want this to be the one that makes it easier to say goodbye.
i want this to be the one that….i don’t now what i want this one to do, other than bring her back.
and it won’t.
_
Nearly seven years later and I still haven’t found the words. My mom didn’t beat her cancer, but by donating, I hope to help give someone else the chance.
(Denise, this is your warning. Apparently all I can write lately is things that make me all weepy, so get your hankie ready.)
I went to bed mad last night. Angry. Pissed off. The reason seems trivial by the light of day, but I didn’t care - I was mad, and I wanted to be mad, because I was hurt and embarrassed and sometimes it just feels good to blame someone else for things you can’t change. It was late, and Alice was curled into my chest, done nursing but clingy enough that I knew I wasn’t going to have any luck scooting her into her own space. And this just felt like too much. It was all just too much. And like Design Star Micheal, I just wanted my mom.
The thing about complaining about your husband, or your kids, is that you have to have the right audience. They have to know how fiercely you love them, and that even when you say “I just want to get in the car and drive and drive and drive” that you would never, ever leave. That you can be so angry with someone and still be devoted to them. That the right thing to say is “Take a deep breath, tomorrow you will be able to talk to him about this calmly. It’s going to be okay” not “Wow, what scum!” I don’t complain about Tom very often because I know what it is like to read someone’s rant and assume that their relationship is flawed to the point of failing - we make judgments based on what we see, and blogs are not fair in that way. So, I didn’t want to come here and vent, I didn’t want to call a friend at 11pm, I didn’t want to talk it out. I just wanted my mom.
(My mom around my age, with my older sister and I)
And then comes the part that will sound hokey, that they reasonable, light of day Ivory smirks at. Because laying there, bitter that my husband said he was sorry before I was done being mad, angry that my infant daughter wanted to lay next to me all night, just pissed off that my mom was dead, the thought “Take comfort in your children, they are what you will be most proud of in your life” came to me, and it wasn’t my thought. How do I explain this without sounding like I want to be on Montel? It was a fully formed sentence, that I did not understand until I said it outloud. I want to brush it aside, claim that I had thought this before and it was just coming back to me, but… it just wasn’t my thought. It was like hearing a friend over a bad telephone wire - you caught the pieces of the sentence, strung them together, and then decoded it. And then you lay, crying, curled around your tiny daughter, thankful and sure.
Take it as you will - I’m not entirely sure what to think about it myself - but it was a moment I couldn’t let go without noting. In the months after my mom died, I would find feathers in the oddest places - in my closed car, in a shoe, between the pages of a library book. I took comfort in these little tokens, half admitting to myself that I hoped they were from my mother, half sure I was schizophrenic for even entertaining the idea. That is where I am today. Perhaps if I had a defined faith, I would be able to fit this experience within the realm of normal, but I don’t, and I can’t. So I’m not over thinking it - I needed that advice last night, and I got it. Perhaps you need to hear it too. Perhaps I will fully understand it in 50 years.
Filed under: My mother
I just took the last picture for a photo-day-in-the-life of today, (though it will be a few days before I manage to edit them and put them together with witty captions,) but I have to ask:
Is it strange to have a birthday party for your dead mother? Yes?
Well then, I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t get her any balloons, because that would have been downright creepy.
(Happy 49th Mom. I wish you could have heard Ella singing to you today, though if you are anywhere in this universe, I’m sure you at least caught the high notes. )
Filed under: As you simplify your life the laws of the universe will, List, My mother
10 Random things I found while digging though an “Ivory’s GoodStuff” box which has been ducttaped closed since before the move, two Novembers ago:
1. One eared sock monkey. My Great Grandma was a doll and toy maker, and all the kids in the family got a sock monkey when they were little. Except me. I can’t complain, since I did get a lot of other toys from her, but I was somehow overlooked when it came to my very own sock monkey. After my Great Grandma died, my mom gave me her sock monkey, and I love that it only had one ear. Ella and Alice both got sock monkey’s from their Aunt Jena this Christmas, so we have a little sock monkey family now.
2. The very first embroidery I ever ‘finished’. The back is here. I was probably 6 or 7 when I started it, and I remember it taking forever. Patience was not my strong suit as a kid, but I wanted to be able to dig around in my mom’s sewing box, so I had to sit down and be still for a few minutes a day. My mom kept it, and I found it in her ‘office’ after she died.
3. Yarn dog from Bea, my 80 year old best friend when I was 5. It turns out that the things I worry about with my daughter really just stem from my fear that she will be like me, and I want it to be easier for her. I want her to be comfortable with her peers, because I never was as a kid. Bea lived in an RV on the same beach we lived on when my dad was working on HWY 101 in North Cali, and when I wasn’t with her or Benji (the disabled vet who lived across the way) or Barbra (the woman who ran the community store) I was hiding under the trailer, playing with slugs and talking to squirrels. Rinse and repeat for 20 years.
4. Speaking of middle aged people who were kind to a kid who had no friends: A bear, a knicknack, and a book from Mrs. Harrison, my speech therapist when I was in k-2nd grade. You wouldn’t know it today by how I can blather on, but when I was young I had major speech issues, and almost no one outside my family could understand me. Enter Mrs. Harrison, who was beyond kind to me. I was so inspired by her, that years later I studied speech pathology for three years of college before realizing that it wasn’t what I wanted and switching to English. I wrote her years ago, thanking her and including a playbill from a play I was in at the time, and she wrote back (and as I keep digging, I’ll probably find the letter).
5. 8 jewelry boxes of random, cheap jewelry, none of which I can bear to throw out (I stopped taking pictures after a while…)
6. A package of moon flower seeds from a plant in my mom’s yard.
7. This tiny boat, from “Undersea World” which is the toy of my earliest memories.
8. A replica of one of my pageant dresses for my ‘ cabbage patch’ doll, Maggie Mae. My mom made my dress, the little dress, and Maggie. She also took me to an estate sell on the way home from losing “Little Miss Oklahoma” and bought me an enormous green bridesmaid’s hat.
9. The postcard that informed me that I had been selected to receive the scholarship that ended up paying for my degree. Until I got this slip of paper, I was planning to stay in the small town I had graduated in, working as a waitress and taking care of my brother. Instead, I came to college, got a degree in something that doesn’t pay but that I love, and met Tom in a Lit. class.
10. An autograph book (like yearbook autographs, not lifestyles of the rich and famous autographs) of my mom’s, which I will probably do a whole other post about, because so many of the pages made me laugh.
When I was young and in a sour mood, my mom would see me moping around and she would tell me to “Keep on keepin’ on”* which makes more sense in my head than it does when I write it out. Basically, “Just keep moving forward, things will get better.” It’s been my manta these last few months, and while I would prefer to be able to call my mom and have her tell me herself, her voice is still loud and clear in my memory. “Buck up, Sam, keep on keepin’ on.”
The depression that sank over me almost 2 months ago was smothering, and through the rough days, I lived in one hour lifetimes. If I could just get through one more hour, it would be okay. One more hour, and then I could call Tom and ask him to come home. One more hour, and I could put Ella down for an early nap (and not feel bad when she sat in her room and yelled that she wasn’t tired). One more hour. I could do an hour. A day felt like eternity, and the idea of what a month from then would look like was impossible, but I could do an hour. And during that hour, I would just keep on keeping on, one foot in front of the other, one more forced smile to keep my daughter from asking “Mama sad? Mama want kisses? Tickles?”
And slowly, it’s gotten better. Depression is not the sort of thing you go to sleep deep in the mire of, and wake up the next day suddenly able to see the sun. It’s slow going & you circle back on your own footsteps time and again, but eventually you realize that you are not sinking quite so deeply with each step. And then you use bad metaphors and realize that you can laugh at yourself, which is to say: it gets better. You just keep on keeping on.
I guess here I have to say that if you are struggling with depression, and more to the point, postpartum depression, sometimes ‘keeping on’ isn’t enough. It’s individual, and I feel like, having been down the depression road before, I knew my limits. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I should have kept the appointment I had with a counselor. Maybe I bet right, and I have come out of the fog without their help as fast as I would have with it, but looking back, it’s not worth the bet. If you are struggling, reach out. I am blessed with friends, both local and online, who have been down this road, and just knowing they were there at 2Am, ready to pick up the phone if I called, made it easier to get through that hour. If you come across this, and need to chat, comment. I can’t say I’ve fought the dragons and won, but I fought a good sized gila monster and see 2AM more than I see 9AM.
Because if you are where I was, you can’t realize how happy you are still capable of being. You can’t understand how one day soon you will look at your family and realize that this, this is worth keeping on.
*Edited to add because I win at Google: Oh my, it’s a song that I suddenly remember my mom singing, which makes me blink back tears. We just keep on keeping on.
Filed under: My mother
Early morning, watching my girls playing on the floor, and hearing the first few bars of this song start (on this podcast). Suddenly remembering my mom playing guitar, singing to my little brother on a quilt in the yard of the Burbank house, and I am in tears, missing her - I am amazed that my heart can hold so much.
*
I have been reading Hope Edelman’s newest book, Motherless Mothers, and I never get more than a few pages read before I have to stop and jot something down in my journal, wishing I had bought the book instead of checking it out from the library so that I could mark it up, underlining things, making notes in the margins. Her previous book, Motherless Daughters, sits on the shelf above my desk, worn and ink stained, a touchstone that quietly reminds me that I am not alone , that these fears, these tsunamis of emotion are expected, healing.
I read Motherless Daughters on the recommendation of the therapist who helped me process my mother’s death in those early days, and it took months and months for me to finish it. In fact, until recently, I had not bothered to read the next to last chapter, “Daughter becomes a Mother” because the idea of becoming a mother was something I couldn’t consider. Mothers die. It wasn’t some abstract fear - it was fact, and it defined how I saw my future.
But here I am, 24 with two little girls, more in common with my mother than ever. Perhaps if I had had the courage to read that chapter before I was a mother, or in the first months of Ella’s life, I would not have been so shocked to hear my mother’s songs in my throat. Perhaps if I had let myself mourn her as a grandmother before Alice’s birth, I wouldn’t have been so preoccupied by her absence lately. Perhaps if I had realized that this fear that “I am not doing it right, I don’t know how to be a mother” is common among those of us without a mom to call with questions, I would not have let it bore so deeply into my self confidence.
But probably not. If nothing else, these books have solidified that I will always be a motherless daughter. I will always have the fear my 40’s, I will always second guess my mothering choices, I will always feel her absence. But perhaps, if I had read that chapter, and the resulting book, I would have realized that by mothering these two little girls, I have been given the chance to connect to my mother in a way I had not been able to before. That, as cheesy as it sounds, loving these girls has proven to me how much my mother loved me.
Someday, I will die. But every day before that, I have the opportunity to hold my girls, to sing softly as they play, to hear my mother’s voice comforting them. Every day, I miss her, but every day I am able to tap into that early reserve of love that she gave me, and pass that on to my girls. There is healing here. There is strength.
So happy just to be alive
Underneath the sky of blue
On this new morning, new morning
New morning with you.
Guys! Why didn’t you tell me it was only three days until Christmas?! Holy.. lord. Jesus. Baby Jesus. In a sleigh.. no, a manger.
I can’t even begin to make a list of what all I had hoped to accomplish before Christmas, and have given up on. I am trying to be gentle with myself, because obviously when I try to be super-mom my boobs revolt and sent me to bed for 36 hours, but Booo is what I say. Ella is going to Pam’s for a few hours tonight and I will try to at least wrap the few presents I managed to order/put together before Cricket’s birth. Tom has tomorrow off, so I’ll also make a list of things we still need (like peppermint schnapps! Ohh hot chocolate, how I love to spike you! Or this works too.) and send him out into the madness, possibly with a toddler. Mwahahaha. I also might make sugar cookie dough, which I can just throw in the fridge and pull out when I need to distract Ella for a couple minutes (because this girl loves to use the cookie cutters. If I wasn’t so scared, I would make her some play-doh, but I like my floors too much.)
So, the girl’s Christmas outfits are not handmade, the majority of Ella’s gifts are second hand books and toys, and anyone who doesn’t live with me is getting a gift certificate. I can live with that. This year. Next year I’m locking both the girls on their side of the craft room and using up some of this fabric I am drowning in. That photo I linked to above? I think the fabric is sexing it up down there in the basement and multiplying, because there is no way it would all fit in those cubbies now. Of course, that may have more to do with my compulsive fabric buying, and the fact that my mother in law owns a fabric shop (and a storage unit of her own random fabric collection) but whatever.
My grandma sent the girls some little quilts for their birthdays, and I love that they have great-grandma blankies. This doll is from her also, and is among Ella’s favorites. I have a strange relationship with my mother’s side of the family, partially carried over from my mom’s own muddy relationship with them, but also of my own doing. I would say “It’s hard to explain” but really, whose family workings are easy to explain? Regardless, I am glad we (meaning, I) have started talking again, since I truly do want my kids to know their family, even if they are so far away. My grandma also sent a piggy bank that had been my aunt’s for the girls, and three unicorn figurines that had been my mom’s. One is a potpourri holder, and has had the same smelly scent in it since I was little, and as soon as I opened the box I felt six again. It was a very welcome Christmas present.
Head over to Toddled Dredge tomorrow for the conclusion of her advent series, which has been thought provoking and refreshing, even for those of us with a… hard to explain relationship with religion. Because other people have an easy to explain relationship with the Lord? I don’t know. Really - I don’t know. Maybe someday I’ll try to explain why my view of religion can only be described as muddy, but for now, head over and read Veronica’s post. The clarity of her vision is inspiring.
A year ago yesterday, my aunt Ruth died. I tried to write about it all day yesterday, and somehow never got past that sentence, which says something about how much I’ve managed to process her death. It’s just.. too much. A part of me feels like the balance of the world was thrown off with her death - it was the final proof that I needed that the daily struggle isn’t worth what we get in the end. (As soon as I write that, I know how disapointed she, the eternal optimist, would be. Not to mention that her faith was what carried her through the pain…) A year on, I realize that my mind is shielding my soul from this reality, not letting me feel it. It’s so easy, 3000 miles away, to pretend …
Well, crap, I’m doing it again, aren’t I?
*Blank stare*
In the last year, the number of times I have talked to my grandmother (who lost both of her daughters in the span of 5 years, both before they were 45) and my cousin (who is one of the few people in the world who may actually understand how angry and sad I am) is in the single digits. It’s not that I talked to them that often before my mother and aunt’s death, but any conversation now is admitting that we have lost links in the chain..
I just can’t write myself into the post. I’m not finding a way in, a point of catharsis. I can’t make this interesting or moving, because when I get close, my stomach knots, my hands tingle, I realize my breath is shallow and I have to back away.
In the last year, so much good has come into my life that you would think the balance would be restored - just my tiny daughter, who was named in part for her great aunt (Ruth Alice), should be enough.
But it is still not fair. I deserved to have one of them. My girls deserved to have a Nana, or a Momo. A Nana AND a Momo. They deserve both, and it’s not fair that they have neither. My mother and aunt deserved to know these beautiful little girls. We all deserved so much more. Someday I’ll find a poetic way to say all of this, but today it is just not fair. At all at all.
Filed under: My mother
This month is National Lung Cancer Awareness Month. We don’t get ribbons or telethons or marathons. No one calls lung cancer survivors “Warriors”, perhaps because so few people who are diagnosed with lung cancer actually survive. I read Susan Sontag’s “Illness at Metaphor” this last year, and started to question how we look at cancer, how we talk about it, and how we treat it. Some cancers have become a part of our collective “Go-Go USA! We can beat this!” attitude, but I get the feeling my mother’s cancer will never break through the stigma of shame that it carries.
Then again, maybe someday things like “Father Quits Smoking For His Child” won’t be considered news (Seen on my google homepage this morning. Thanks universe.)
My sister and her boys have created a tradition of letting balloons go today, to float up to their Nana in heaven. I intended to piggy back on this idea today, but somehow ran out of daylight. I also intended to write something beautiful and personal and lovely about my mom, but each time, I just run out of steam. I miss my mom. But, otherwise, I had a very good day. I played with Ella, I made a boppy cover, I finished a book, I kissed my husband, and I had some pie. I think my mom would approve.
Last night, as I was finally falling asleep, I heard fire truck after fire truck rush past our house, continuing down the hill. A child of tornado-alley, I instinctually started making a list of what I would shove into my pillowcase if I needed to rush to safety - obviously Ella and Tom would be the first things to be thrown out the window, but then the material things: my wedding ring, the photo box, the insurance papers. The thickblack binder with my mother’s letters. I realized, as I lay in bed trying not to imagine where the fire trucks had been going, that the binder was downstairs, in my craft room, next to the furnace, and if our our house were to ever catch on fire there was almost no chance that I could save anything down there. Poof - ashes.
I did my best to get out of bed quietly, but woke up Tom as I opened our bedroom door. He has gotten used to this lately - I am up two or three times a night just to wander the house, my body getting into the rhythm of a nursing infant I suppose. He mumbled that he loved me, and then rolled back over to cover up Ella before he fell back asleep. I did my best not to run down the basement stairs, sure that the binder wouldn’t be there - that somehow it had gotten lost, and that they were gone. Panic is easy to fall into when you are tired, and I panicked as I ran my hands over the books and journals, trying to remember the last time I saw it, the last time I really read her letters.
In the midst of the worst depression I have ever known, in my sophomore year of college, I started seeing a therapist on campus. I went in saying that that I was there for anxiety, an eating disorder, insomnia. And, in a way, I was there for all of those things. But what it took us 3 months of talking in circles for me to admit was that I was there because my mother was dead.
Until that point, I had lied to the therapist, told her my mother was living in Oklahoma, that we talked every couple days, that she was great.Wonderful.My best friend. I lied, because if I said it outloud, it was easy to pretend that it was true. I lied, because it felt so good to live in a world where my mother was alive, if just for a few hours a week. I lied because I just wanted to be fixed - I wanted someone to shove gauze into the wound, give me some antibiotics, and tell me that I would be better in a week. Ignore the cause, treat the symptoms.
Luckily (though I would not have used that word then) therapy does not work that way. I slipped one day, mentioned my aunt who I had not spoken to since my mother’s death, and watched the lie fall apart. Suddenly, the sessions were about her death, our relationship, my childhood, my family as a whole. The breathing exercises we had worked on for my strange anxiety months before, were suddenly relevant as I sat, numb but sobbing, unable to remember why I had shown up for another session when I always left feeling darker and less healed than before.
It was in this period that I started digging through boxes, sorting out the letters that were poking out of books and shoved into boxes of crafts, and putting together a timeline. My mother had written me (us really, my sister and I) hundreds of letters in the 7-or-so years between us going to live with our father and her death, but the details of those years were hazy. Rereading the small stack of letters I had somehow saved, my mother became a person I had not known before. She was real - she was frustrated and lonely and angry and funny and optimistic and wanted so badly to give her daughters (and later, after Luke moved in with us) her son, a chance to know who she was. So she wrote. She wrote to us about our family, about her goals, about the things she was proud of us for, about the things she worried about. Through all of this we also called and talked, but I can barely remember voice when I try to remember those calls - in these letters, she is loud and clear, her laugh unmarred by the rattling cough. In these letters, I refound my mama - not the memory of my mother, or the lie I had created to replace my mother. Just my mama.
Last night, I brought the binder upstairs with me, close enough to be grabbed and thrown into a pillowcase if I am forced to choose what is saved, what can be burned. Today, I am reading. I am scanning in the pages and saving them privately on Flickr (if I am doing it right, my sister should also be able to see them, and if my brother is interested, of course I will find a way for him to see them also) because I worry, in a moment of panic, whether I would walk into the fire to try and save the letters. If I could forget that they are just paper and memories. If I could bear to lose her again.
