Mother's Day

Perhaps this is how it was always meant to be, after-all it began with a young girl yearning to be loved and ended with that same girl, though experience and years had aged her, still thirsting for a love that made sense to her. 

 That’s the thing about love; it doesn't always show up in the ways you’d expect. At 15, my Mom showed love by choosing to keep the child she found her all too young self, pregnant with.  At 16 I showed up in a delivery room vying for my own version of that love.  Over the course of the next 40 years our ideas of love didn't always align but love was there – a love that transcends pain and reason. 

Love, I've learned is often a person’s ideal of how we think others should treat us, how they should make us feel, what we can get out of it. We expect to be loved by our own perfect description of it and feel justified in withholding our own love when hurt, misunderstanding, and wrongs have occurred. But despite that, I've also learned that love shows up.

My Mom would tell you she spent a lifetime disappointing people – just ask her siblings – most deprived her of their love until (and perhaps even after) her dying day. Failed relationships and marriages that ended in divorce seemed to prove to her that she was not worthy of that love either. Even the love of her children was threatened as hard choices were made over the years. Truth be told, she caused some hurt, she had some regrets, and made some bad choices but I've yet to meet someone who hasn't. 

My Mom was not a selfless person but not because she was selfish, but because she sought love so desperately she took to attaining it in ways that didn't make sense to many of the people in her life.

To those that loved her and allowed her to love them back you’ll hear a different story; and this is mine.

Being the daughter of a teenage mother had its share of challenges; while I was learning to walk and talk she was determined to graduate High School. While I was entering my school years she was a twenty-something single Mom trying to balance responsibility and not let life pass her by. When I was planning a wedding she was divorced and working on making a new relationship work. While I was hoping for a baby she was watching her husband die of cancer. While I was trying to become a Mom, she was busy being a Mom and step Mom. While I was working on being a wife and Mom, she longed for me to need her and yet often, as circumstances dictated, her need for me was greater.  We zig-zagged in our relationship and many times the roles reversed as I did my best to “mother her”; all the while dealing with my own disappointing ideas of the love and relationship between a Mom and her daughter.

Bob always says, “in order to move past disappointment we must give up the hope that things could have been any different.” These are wise and healing words. As I started to embrace that truth I began to see my Mom through different eyes. 
Eyes that didn't condemn, hold grudges, or demand justice. Eyes that saw a woman just like me learning about life and love through experiences the people in our lives. Eyes that saw her, really saw her as someone who desires love, acceptance, and loyalty like we all do.

My Mom may not have gotten everything right, but she loved in the only way she knew how and for me that was enough. She was at my school programs, helped me stand up for my rights, offered support and encouragement when I needed it most, gave me away at my wedding, celebrated my victories, mourned with my losses. She painstakingly helped me sort through and pack boxes as we planned our move even though she wanted nothing more than for us to stay.  

Through both the good and bad times she taught me about love – love that isn't bound by someone else’s perimeters but the kind that sees through them and loves anyway.  I don’t know if she knew, really knew how much I loved her until the very end – I think she always feared she had failed me in some way, but love showed up.  As I sat by her side, stroking her hair, rubbing lotion into her hands and feet reminiscing about the good times she smiled because she knew she was loved, and as I laid my head on her chest while she breathed her last breaths I knew I was loved.

So on this Mother’s Day, my first without hearing her voice, I long to pick up the phone, to remind her again that she was a great Mom, that I am proud to be her daughter, and that I will honor her life and memory until my own last breath because that’s what love does.