With every year I age, I grow further away from the year my mother passed away. I grow closer to the year when, even had she lived, she would no longer be on this earth anyway.
After 32 years, I still miss my mother as if she left us just yesterday.
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My mother and I, about 18 months old, in
Fredericksburg, Virginia. |
I was always closer to my father than my mother – a specific bond existed between us that no one else could duplicate. I chose to hang out with my dad even when I was a child.
Until the day he died in 2002, I always preferred the companionship of my father – the sound of his voice, the delight in his hearty laughter, the simplicity of his faith in God.
Yet, it is the loss of my mother that makes me ache, even after all these years.
What is a mother?
Anyone who has carried a child in her belly knows the answer to this question. We are bound to our child from conception. It is our mother's voice that draws us as infants and whom we hear scolding us even into adulthood when we misbehave.
A mother has her own way of comforting us – a soothing hand patting our back, holding our heads when we are sick, preparing our favorite food.
She teaches us to seek and desire a life separate from her, yet yearns to hold onto us tightly and never truly let us go.
She is the first one we laughingly blame when our own children are growing and we realize that we've reprimanded our children the same way she did. "Holy cow, I have turned into my mother!"
She is the one who taught us how to tuck the sheets into the mattress, slip a pillowcase on the pillow, fold our clothes, do our laundry.
Mother is the one who taught us how to cook, cut a tomato, make a tuna sandwich, bake those Toll House cookies just right.
Mother is the one who made Christmas extra special each and every year – putting forth so much effort and sacrifice so the magic is always there.
Christmas is when I miss my mother the most. It's when I remember how exhausted my mother was because I too, am beyond tired. Those traditions she held, the special food, the stories – to be passed down through subsequent generations.
Mother is the one who knew just what to give me when I was home sick from school. The right comfort food, the cool cloth on my forehead, the warm, fuzzy blanket.
She also knew when I was faking and how to catch me at it. She was the one who spanked me with the riding crop she'd gleefully found in the antique store until the day I found its hiding place and broke it. Mother is the one who substituted her high heel shoe in place of the riding crop I had broken.
I deserved every spanking I got and I am none the worse for wear despite the harshness of those punishments. She taught me how to respect – not just my elders, but also my parents.
Remembering Mom
At the age of 19, I was estranged from my parents for a time. At this time, they moved to Missouri from the east coast and I moved on with my life – not speaking to my parents for an entire year.
My mother was 59 at the time, 18 months older than I am now. And I really didn't know her very well.
After a year of lackluster correspondence, we reconciled the way that older generation did – we picked up where we left off without ever bringing up the ugly past.
Little did I know as I selfishly rolled through my lower 20s, that my mother would only be with us another five years.
For a long time I only had the few years of letters from her to comfort me. I lived with the guilt from the rift we'd had and the time I had lost with her – it consumed me for years.
Thirty-two years after my mother died, I discovered a box of letters she had written to my older sister during the six years after my parents had moved back to Missouri. Reading through each one, I discovered just how wise my mother had been during our estrangement.
Urging my father to forgive me and my sister to let the past go had been my mother's constant advice. Despite equal fault on all our sides, my parents never accepted responsibility for their part in our estrangement. However, the art of forgiveness and reconciliation was exacted with precision and grace and we never looked back.
In reading those letters I found the forgiveness I had desired from my mother for over 30 years. She not only forgave, she loved me deeply.
Once again I found my mother and experienced every bit of her personality, not just from those last years, but also from the time she met my father, dated and married him. Their first years as loving newlyweds are evident in yet another box of letters my father had saved.
I learned of every place they had ever lived, their church family, neighbors and friends, their income and debts, their wishes and desires, their heartaches and fears.
From the beginning my mother wrote newsy letters – daily. When Dad went away on business, she wrote him every, single day. In reading through these treasures, I found myself re-living those days with them.
The letters my mother wrote in the last six years of her life were even more informative as if she was writing her life's diary. She wrote of the Missouri weather, the local church people, their new friends and reacquainting themselves with family and old friends. She wrote about their garden, our cat Buttons, shopping at the mall, visiting the Truman Library, Missouri sunsets and its rolling countryside, ice cream from the local Dairy Queen, trips to restaurants, what they ate and how much it cost.
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My Mom & Dad in December 1977. Dad was celebrating his
25th anniversary as an Episcopal Priest. They are holding
the vestments (white & blue) Mom had made for him. My
father would later be buried in the same vestments. |
Sounds trivial doesn't it? It's not – it is endearing and comforting in taking me back to the commonality and complexity that was my parents.
In 1982 there were no huge flat-screened TVs, no CD players, DVD players, cell phones, multiple phone carriers or Internet. Microwave ovens had just become more commonplace as had answering machines and cassette players, yet they didn't have any of these. Life was enjoyed with rabbit ears on the 24" TV and a good book.
Communication was done through the telephone or letter writing – an art my mother had nailed perfectly.
I am so grateful that I have these reminders of who she was. That I can still hear her voice calling me, "Elizabeth Anne!" That I can look at one of her paintings, remembering the time she painted the lilacs and they had been dead for months before she finished her artwork. I can still remember her childish delight at seeing her grandson Jimmy, hanging out at my brother's cabin in Maine, climbing a mountain or catching a fish when we went out fishing.
I remember the special trip to our favorite spot on the Potomac River in Virginia that she took me on in my senior year. Because I didn't have a date to the prom, my mother treated me to a mother/daughter retreat that I've never forgotten.
I can easily recall the taste of her remarkable fried chicken and the way she would take the extra time to cook up a huge batch for our first day on vacation so we could keep up our traditional lunch when we stopped at a roadside park.
I can remember the smell of her Tony perms and the Pond's cold cream she used twice a day. The sight of a pair of earrings on her bedside table – removed just before she turned out the light. Her tuna casserole for Christmas Eve dinner – served in between Dad's Christmas services; her layout of dip, cheese, crackers and Cold Duck served to us after the midnight service, along with a real Smithfield ham and southern biscuits; the Christmas morning breakfast of pancakes and waffles and filling my stocking with delightful surprises.
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My mother in 1965, exhausted yet smiling, after
a busy Christmas of multiple church services,
bazaars, meals, gifts and family visits. |
I can see my mother's white knuckles as she gripped the steering wheel whenever she drove and the sight of her slightly manicured nails, always covered with a smidgin of clear polish.
She saved dimes throughout the year to pay for our Christmas tree and stocked her dresser with a hoard of hosiery, bobby pins, hair combs, emery boards and orange-red Tangee lipstick. Her closet always had a variety of different colored Grasshopper sneakers, aprons and dusters to wear around the house.
I am reminded of a time when life was much slower. When we weren't bombarded daily by news, phone calls and texts, emails, and social network. When our lives weren't cluttered with a house full of electronic equipment and when our mailboxes were loaded with hand-written letters and cards.
Despite 32 years of separation by death, my mother remains close to me – my heart and mind rich with memories. Nothing separates us from our loved ones, not even death – for memories comfort, teach and live within us forever.
