Somewhere in my office at home there’s a laminated mass card. On the front is Mary in her predictable blue, and on the back above a verse is my mothers name in gold lettering with today’s date - give or take a decade and a half.
The last time I saw her, she didn’t see me.
My sister and I had spent some time that morning taking buses around San Francisco and shopping for mom. Not for mothers day (belated), but for her final outfit. We bought ourselves over sized sunglasses that day, too, since our eyes were already puffy with shots of crimson running through them. That day we said good-bye, Jen signed the papers and we sobbed with varying degrees of intensity and held each other in one way or another all the way back to my dad’s place in the south bay.
It doesn’t matter how many years pass. Mothers Day is a heinous, stomach wrenching roller coaster ride I don’t want to get on…but with the push push push of the crowd I suddenly find myself strapped in, eyes clenched, waiting for it to be over.
Hmmm. Mom. My pre-teen and teenage years were riddled with a series of hospitalizations. Where developmental time lines should be flagged with milestones like first kisses and proms, instead there are open heart surgeries and amputations. In place of sleepovers with girlfriends, there were sleepovers at the foot of moms bed, so that when she woke up and needed help in the middle of the night, I’d hear her…and could hop up to carry her to the bathroom.
I was born too late, and had only the briefest glimpse at the woman who gave me breath as a mother. There were only a few years between my arrival and the turn. When I was of an age enough to know her, and finally learning to communicate, she was sad and sick and - I believe - terribly lonely and alone.
The memory of her I cling to is this: we sat at the edge of the fireplace hearth, our knees on red shag carpet and using big grey rocks as a writing surface, and colored together. She rarely had time for these things - there were four children and associated feeding/bathing/laundry/toys to pick up/school events to tend to, and a house that absolutely, positively had to be impeccably maintained (due to undiagnosed OCD, most likely). This particular night, though, we sat at the fireplace and colored. Her picture was so perfectly shaded, so crisp and flawless that I was beside myself. I’d never seen anything so wonderful.
“I want to color like you. How do you do that?” I asked. She showed me how to trace the outline of the drawing, with extra force leaving a wall of wax behind so it would be darker and form a kind of moat. She showed me how to fill in the space, holding my crayon at an angle in my uncoordinated little hand and moving it lightly across the soft paper. My sheet was still a mess in the end, but it was better than anything I’d made so far in my life and therefore a huge accomplishment and work of art.
In that series of moments, and with one sentence and one demonstration, she taught me more than she knew…or probably intended to: that with desire, questions, observation and practice, I can do lots of things I didn’t know I could.
I still struggle with a twinge of resentment that the coloring episode is the only (or at least the strongest) memory I can conjure up where she was healthy and truly my mother. More frequently with the years that pass, I stand back and see the whole ugly mess of my youth for what it was and feel numb. With years of work, I am able to have an appropriate sense of sadness for her, for me, my siblings, my father and her family. I’m able to recognize that I didn’t really have it so bad - even if it wasn’t ideal - and that without those years and those scars and what happened next, I wouldn’t be here, breathing, typing, expressing, revealing, risking and cleansing.
It’s her anniversary, and I’m here at a keyboard in a funk wishing I could wear those giant sunglasses all day today. Her ashes are in Colma, behind a marble square with her name and the dates of her reign etched in its surface. She’s on the other coast, close to the water, not far from where her parents and brother lay, near her history, within the reach of the eucalyptus and the redwoods, the train, the city, her church and her sisters.
It’s difficult sometimes to say why I miss her, but in the end, she was my mother…and I do.
I write, you read. It's a clean and simple relationship.