Motherless

My third Mother's Day without her

If the word “Motherless” weren’t in the news these days as the latest atrocity we didn’t need, I’d start this essay with a statement of my motherlessness, which is literally true.

In case you don’t know, no shade thrown at you for keeping your nose out of the news in these unbearable days, Motherless is a website where sick men post graphic videos of them raping their wife, perhaps the mother of their unlucky children, while the woman has been drugged to sleep. Men paid twenty bucks to watch these user generated videos. And they post training videos for how to do it.

Motherless has since been taken down, but this is just one of the websites that hosts this sort of depravity. This is where we are, shadows stretching into the light for all to see.

We have work to do.

This isn’t that story though.

I just experienced my third Mother’s Day without my momma. I didn’t wake up crying. Grief doesn’t creep through my first waking thoughts like before, like just after her death in Spring of 2024 when I couldn’t feel my legs and couldn’t stop crying.

Time keeps moving, month after month, some of them inching like a sloth and others like a cheetah. Grief has nested in me, grabbing bits of memories and laughs, building a place to stay. She is the friend who doesn’t leave.

Natalie Goldberg said of loneliness that it came to her and didn’t ever really leave her, she just turned the corner with it. In many ways this is how I feel about my grieving the loss of mom. I’ve turned the corner, and yet there grief sits in the passenger seat next to me.

Some days grief is quiet, a quick stab in the chest when a whisper of her voice lands against my current reality. Mom is not next to me physically, yet she still speaks. Andrea Gibson said that when she passed she’d be more with us, not less. I’m still thinking about that.

I’m not in a puddle of wet, sloppy tears, most days anyway, until I write about her. When I read aloud what I’ve written, that’s when emotion chokes me, my voice in a vice grip. Still, the words come and get spoken because they are the most true part of me.

I think she might be helping me write the stuff she couldn’t say. I feel her hand in mine as I write, her arm around me as I paint, her gaze on my sad face when I feel too much or when I worry about the world we now live in. The one she left, lucky girl.

I began a new life without her. It doesn’t seem fair, but there it is, happening every day. I’m motherless and strangely I’m writing a memoir, memories surfacing from the portal her loss created.

It’s odd to be writing stories of her life, even though I was there for so much of it. Do I have the right to tell our stories, the stories of her mother, and her mother’s mother? When I wonder what she would say, I hear her.

Honey, it’s ok. You can’t hurt me now. I’m sorry I hurt you. Tell your stories.

If she were alive, walking next to me, she’d skid words across the surface of thin ice. She mostly avoided deep conversations. I think I might have avoided them with her too. There was so much to tell that buzzed like bees, we didn’t want them disturbed.

I’m writing a book, mom. I will make you proud.