Mother’s Day for Orphans

Originally posted May 2, 2021

It’s a week away, but the emails began a month ago. Gifts for Mom for Mother’s Day. Discounts on flowers. Clothing sales. Delete, delete, delete. Don’t they know my mother died on Christmas Eve?

Four months have passed. The urge to call her with news in my life is still strong. For most of us, it’s true that our mothers are our greatest fans, and without them, our mediocre art work won’t hang on anyone’s refrigerator anymore.

I told my mother long ago that I would never stop bothering her with my problems. Death wouldn’t stop me from talking to her. I meant it. At the time I said it, she responded with a sarcastic, “Oh, good.” I’m either imagining or still receiving those types of responses now when I talk to her, although her humor is much less biting.

The conversation has been ongoing since she died. I suppose it depends on a person’s beliefs about death, but to me, it seems clear that no energy is ever lost. It changes form, but it can’t be obliterated. It’s her energy that I trust I connect with.

She has changed. I imagine that who she is now is who she was in essence before she was programmed, indoctrinated, and beaten down by her life. She is much subtler now, more tolerant, more relaxed, more accepting. Stripped of the belief that worthiness has to be earned with hard work and the orthodoxy of Southern women of her generation, I am finally getting a glimpse of who she really was.

I feel her presence more strongly at times when I am focused on a task. She is very often with me in the kitchen. She still critiques what I write. On my darkest days, when I have the thought of missing her, the response always hijacks my brainwaves before sadness sets in: “I’m right here.”

There is little comfort in knowing the grief of losing a parent is universal. For years, orphaned friends have told me the discomfort of Mother’s Day and other holidays after the death of the first person who loved you and the first person you loved is no longer in physical form. Understanding it is the natural order of life, we have no choice but to adjust.

The days of exchanging gifts are over, and the memory of the exact sound of her voice becomes a little more distant every day as her responses to my life simply appear as unspoken thought in my head. Sitting here now, I realize that I don’t miss my mother. Either she has convinced me, or I have convinced myself, that she has not gone anywhere. She is new and complete. It has always been, and it remains an honor to know her.