February 12, 2020
I woke up with a dull ache in my back. I must have slept wrong. It wasn’t a sharp pain, but enough that I noticed it with each breath. I guess it’s an appropriate start for the day that I ponder life and death, love and sorrow. Most days I go through without giving much thought to what it means to be on this side of the living, most days I don’t think about how in every breath, every heartbeat I am being lovingly sustained by my creator. Four years ago my mom passed on to the next life, we usually call it heaven. She no longer lives here where there are back aches and soul aches; losses and hurt feelings; where all things decay eventually…except love. The absence of my mom feels like being homesick (and being homesick, I realized many years ago, is actually feeling deeply heavensick). In my childhood home there was a big lazyboy armchair. As a child, my mom would rock me in it and as a teenager I would flop myself down in it after a long day of school. When I left home for college I grew and changed and had to carry a lot more than ever before- be responsible and all that. I loved the feeling of coming back home, flopping once again into that chair and having a few days to be doted on and taken care of. For those few days the weight of the world was lifted and I was renewed enough to go back into the world. By the time I had my first child, my parents had moved from my childhood home, and actually the lazyboy armchair had already changed a couple of times. Now as a parent myself, I had gained a whole new appreciation for responsibility-this tiny fragile human being depended on me- ME, for his life. It was incredible and terrifying all at the same time. My husband would be gone for a weekend occasionally in those first few months of his life, so I would head “home” to my parents house to collapse my tired and scarred body into that chair. When my son would wake to be fed, I would take him to that chair and several times I fell asleep enveloped by it, it wrapping me up and me wrapping my son up. When I think back to the feeling of that chair, and long for the feeling of that chair, it wasn’t actually the chair at all, of course. It was that when I came home, curled up in the fetal position with a warm blanket around me, I didn’t have to be at the top of the responsibility pyramid. I could just be the beloved daughter.
All day long, I hear a steady stream of requests and needs: “Mommy, carry me. Mommy, look at me. Mommy, is this good? Mommy, “hep” me! Mommy, rock me” I respond as best I can, but on days like this I wonder to myself, do we ever outgrow the need to be carried, the need to be looked at, the need to have someone affirm our questions, help us, rock us? I long to be home, truly home where I am sure I’ll flop onto some heavenly lazboy chair, take a deep breath of sweet air, and be rocked and looked at with more love than I can imagine.
I come from a long line of women who died unexpectedly from aortic dissection, their hearts had literally grown so large they burst. In the times that I feel weak and question my ability to be a mother without my own mother, I gain strength through memory. I remember that my mom learned how to be a mother without her own mother present, and her mother before her, did the same. When I’m deeply saddened by the fact that my daughter never got to meet her maternal grandmother, I think of my maternal grandmother who I never met yet still feel a connection to. I think how a female unborn baby has all the eggs she will ever have before she is 20 weeks in the womb. Therefore, in a physical way when my mom carried me in her womb, she was also carrying a piece of her granddaughter. I too was held by my grandmother in some mysterious link between all women.
There are times I give in to self-pity. Times I want to yell “it’s not fair!” However, the feeling that is often the most overpowering when I really remember my mom is gratitude. Gratitude for her being, gratitude for her love that continues on, gratitude that she instilled in me a confidence that I am beloved and one day I will be rocked again.