Forty-three years ago today the nine-year-old girl I was woke up with a houseful of loved ones to begin her walk through a dimly lit, dank tunnel. My mother had died while I was sleeping.
The news was broken to my numerous brothers and sisters as we gathered, both sitting and standing, around the kitchen table. Afterwards I made lemonade in a brown Tupperware pitcher. I think it was Country Time brand. Making a fresh pitcher was memorable, my brothers and I always evaded the task. We would leave an ounce of liquid in the bottom of the pitcher for the next person to lift it from the fridge to the light weight of disappointment. “Who didn’t make more lemonade?!” the thirsty victim would ask aloud for people in the next room to hear, never receiving an answer, stuck to complete the task themselves. I made lemonade and put the full pitcher in the refrigerator without pouring myself a glass.
Hardee’s biscuits later arrived in the kitchen courtesy of my adult brother Jack. I unwrapped one, looked at it, wrapped it back up and returned it to the bag. Fast food was a rarity in our lives, a Hardee’s biscuit wasn’t something to pass up. These moments are my first recollection of not being able to eat or drink. Recently my twenty-two year old son got upset with a situation and couldn’t eat dinner, his stomach wouldn’t allow it. I quickly grew concerned, wondering what I could do to ease his mind.
Throughout my motherhood I have watched my children experience hard things and have tried to help. My own mom was not present to offer me comfort or support during hard times, so perhaps I doubled down on my attempts to meet my sons’ emotional needs. My counselor says that part of healing my own hurt is when I am reminded of a difficult time in my development to consider how someone could have treated me that would have made me feel safe and secure.
“A big part of therapy,” she says, “is re-parenting ourselves.”
If adult me could speak to nine-year-old me, tanned from my summer days at the pool with my brothers, who woke up on a warm summer day to a dead mother, what would I say? Would I tell me that in forty three years I will have raised three sons of my own that are happy, healthy, and kind? Would that make me feel like things are going to be alright? I know I would tell her that she is loved, and that I am so very sorry for all the pain she feels.
I would hug her tight and let her cry and cry and cry. I know that my tears would fall as well, though I would not be crying because it was my mother, too, that died.
At fifty-two years old the loss for me is different. I have forty-three years of coping under my belt. I have not cried over the loss of my mother in recent memory. Her absence has become such a matter of course in my life that I have grown incapable of imagining her here with me. I think of her death and I am sad for nine-year-old me, for myself on my wedding day, for the new mother I was who didn’t have her own mother to guide her, and for so many other versions of me who yearned for my mom’s presence and love. I wanted so badly to hear her tell me that I was doing okay.
My youngest son turned eighteen the month I turned fifty, the same age my mother was when she died. Perhaps the combination of reaching the age she was when she passed and ushering my last son into adulthood was a subconscious finish line of sorts? While I am sad for my younger motherless self, I am not sad for the present me. At the 43 year mark, I can confidently say I am no longer grieving.
In my minds-eye I am ten years older than now, sitting on a shoreline in a low beach chair. I have a wide brimmed hat on my head. One of my adult sons is standing at the water’s edge holding the hand of his three-year-old child. The waves slowly but repeatedly keep rolling gently to the shore covering the child ankle deep. My son and his child stand there for some time, the little one exploring this new wonder of their world, their father’s steady hand anchoring the child to the world their little mind already knows.
The two of them walk over the sand to my chair and I smile at the both of them, my heart growing within my chest. I am proud of my son for being a good and present father, I am excited for my grandchild’s new oceanic discovery. The love we share fills the salt air between us.
I did not know my mother in my adulthood, so the idea that I will know my sons during theirs is a magical mystery tour. I haven’t any life experience with this path, but I am so excited to take it.
My commitment is the same as it was in their upbringing: I will be a source of constant love to my children, a safe place, a person with whom they know they are fully loved and desperately cherished, no matter the state of their schooling, their jobs, their relationships, or any facet of their lives. My love will never waver, and I will always be a place their hearts can come home to in order to rest and refuel. I will always make sure they know they are okay.
The woman I am today would tell nine-year-old me that she will again feel constant and incredible love, but it will take some time.
My re-parenting myself took the form of two decades of being fully present for my own sons, and filling their needs to the best of my ability. I can think of no better example of “it is in giving that we receive.”
I have healed myself by loving them.
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