On This Mother’s Day

 

It’s been twenty years since my mother’s death. She had been ill with COPD and congestive heart failure for several years before her death one month before her sixty-sixth birthday. She stopped smoking ten years earlier, but it wasn’t enough. She died alone in her home.

My oldest son accompanied me on the drive over when I couldn’t reach her by telephone. We found her lying on the floor of her bedroom; she had collapsed earlier that morning from the look of things. It’s not that I was unprepared for this outcome because we’d known for years that this was coming. But I don’t know anyone who’s prepared to see their mother that way. I certainly wasn’t, nor was my fifteen-year-old son. You persevere through the shock and unyielding pain and eventually it diminishes but it never goes away.

We celebrate Mother’s Day this year on my mother’s birthday, May 8th. Ours wasn’t a perfect relationship, but then that’s not uncommon between mothers and daughters. She had her own set of challenges to deal with and in spite of the issues between us, I was always her support system.

At some point, most children forgive their parents for being human. I don’t see my mother in the same way as I did when she was alive. I’m only eight years away from her age when she died, and it’s not forgiveness I feel, but understanding.

We do the best we can as mothers. Even when no one knows that or understands what it takes for us to do so. Sometimes we make choices that send us in a direction that we don’t expect and we have to wing it probably more than we want to admit, but at the end of the day, our kids are our priority.

My mother raised two children, eventually raising my brother while a single mother. I was in college by the time my parents divorced but I remained in close contact with her throughout the remainder of her life. Although she was reluctant to fully understand me, she did nevertheless.

It’s the knowing a mother has about her children. And it’s the willingness to wait for them to arrive at the same. I miss talking to her. She had a practical way of seeing the world and didn’t suffer fools as they say. A Depression-era baby, she was strong and self-sufficient. She accepted her life as it was. And she always reminded me when to set my clocks back or ahead. I just wish we’d get rid of it entirely because I never get it right.

She’d be so proud of her grandsons and their accomplishments. She loved their strange sense of humor and their natural curiosity. And she would be so pleased to know that they married wonderful women. She would love that the most.

And she would love that Jerry and I celebrated thirty-seven years of marriage today.

This Mother’s Day will be bittersweet, falling on her birthday this time. She always said it was just another day. She was wrong. Motherhood changes along the way. We’re never prepared for it when it happens. And when you lose your mother too soon you don’t have her wisdom to guide you through the rough spots, which are many.

But Mom, I thank you… for everything. You mattered. And it was never just another day.

~Blessed Be