Remembering Momma

365 days without her

Thank you for being here and for following my journey. I’ve recorded this essay and the recording is below.

I cried most of the day yesterday. It was the one year anniversary of my mom’s death. Last year, I added “Mom’s Passing Over” to Saturday, April 6 on my calendar – as if I had to note it in order to remember the date. How absurd to imagine that one day I may forget.

This day last year I was experiencing the agony of watching my beloved momma struggle, fighting against taking her last breath like a newborn is determined to take their first. Her final chapter of life is so indelibly etched in my mind, just as the pendant I now wear is etched with her handwriting from an old birthday card “Love you lots, Mom”.

I feel a new sense of freedom to write authentically about our relationship now, since she can no longer feel the pain my words may cause. 

We had a complicated relationship, but not in the love/hate way many mother/daughter relationships go. I became her caregiver, really beginning from about the time her second ex-husband called her up on the phone at work and shot himself in the head while she listened, depression and desperation seeping through the phone line. I was not there, and I can barely imagine the agony of that phone call. 

I was in seventh grade.

She never talked to me about what happened. I had been at a sleepover at my friend Mary Anne’s house that day. Someone, likely one of my older sisters, collected me before the sleepover was over — with the ominous news that something tragic had happened. I don’t remember how she told me the story or what she told me exactly or even who picked me up. I know I felt ashamed as if it were some dark family secret I had to keep now.

I remember lying in bed that night, listening to my mom reliving the horrific play-by-play to a friend. She must have thought I was sleeping or maybe she just couldn’t tell me directly. That’s how I found out how it happened, that on the day their divorce was final, he was so enraged and maybe drunk out of his mind that he chose to end his life while making her pay the price for leaving him.

We all paid.

I remember we went to the funeral home to attend his service and his five children had us removed. It was all our fault that he committed this heinous act. We were not welcome there.

Resilience is part of my coming of age story. Trauma was buried deeply into my psyche. I felt so much sadness for my mom, who had already endured three years of physical and emotional abuse from this same man. Of course I was there too. Enduring.

I remember these days in brief frames, as if they were well-crafted movie scenes created individually for effect. Snapshots, if you will, as memories drift in and out. Elusive. 

Burnt-orange colored sculpted carpet, that was oddly covering the wall of my first ever solo bedroom after she married him. Orange was my favorite color. It was supposed to be a new start for us all.

Him coming home, us anticipating the mood he might be in. If we had undergone a recent bout of him throwing mom against the stove in the kitchen after accusing her of being with another man, he might come home with gifts for all of us. Flowers. Candy. Remorse. Love?

If he’d been out drinking, he’d come home jealous, violent, angry. We existed in limbo, waiting for the next really bad thing to happen, and when it did, we dumped our clothes and few belongings into big black garbage bags. My favorite jeans. My record albums. My journal. We fled to the safety of mom’s parents, my grandparents, who fed me frozen blueberries because they knew how much I loved them. Comfort. Emotional Rest.

What seems like dozens of times and may have actually been a handful, my stepfather convinced mom back into his lure. Our returns were always met with lavish attention and guilt-laden gestures which worked for a while until the next round began.

I decided to look for signs. Not logical signs but the superstitious kind, like if the sunset shone a beautiful orange across the cornfield behind us he would come home happy. Even then, I was mining tragic situations for any shred of silver lining I could find.

Mom finally found the strength to leave for good. I don’t know the inciting incident. I must have felt a weird mixture of relief, uncertainty, and maybe hope. This time in my life is blacked out in chunks of distorted or missing memory.

I do remember the house we rented when we escaped. Rat-infested and small but mom could afford it and it was safer than the one that held violence and red-hot jealousy. I remember my step-dad pounding on our new front door one day, purple-faced with mea culpa and me sending him away because mom wasn’t home.

After the suicide, I felt like I needed to be her protector, as her grief was stuffed into the party girl role she was so apt to play. There was no therapy for any of us – it wasn’t the thing to do back then. She worked as a waitress at night and often stayed after to party with her work friends and customers. I didn’t sleep until she got home. I was the kid calling the bar asking for my mom.

I realize how harsh this story seems but it’s really just the way life sometimes works out, and this time period marks the beginning of the relationship mom and I carried until April 6, 2024 when she left this physical world. It was all part of the master plan.

I did eventually carry on with my life as a young woman, leaving for college in 1979 and growing new roots of my own. She carried on with hers, too, without me needing to save her from anything as if I could ever save her from anything – for several years. She was never good with money or men, but she was independent and I think she was happy.

In 1991, I was married with two children when mom found herself in yet another financial pinch. We happened to need some help with after-school care and we had an unfinished basement that could be made into a small apartment. Win-win.

We were tangled in co-dependent, interconnected ways for the rest of our days together. She mothered me, I mothered her. Lovingly, always. I can see now how beautiful and perfect it was even though I wouldn’t have called it that, then.

She taught me to love deeply and to worry incessantly. That last part may have come factory-installed, but we shared the unhealthy trait of worry as if our lives depended on it.

She was a strong woman, choosing to be happy no matter her circumstances. She was quick-witted — not a deep thinker on the surface and able to make us belly laugh with her one-liners.

Mom was vibrant. She lit up every room she entered. She was the hardest working woman I’ve ever known, and she taught me to be one too. She was generous and kind and would help anyone who needed it, often giving her last dollar or just past it.

She was our matriarch. Family meant everything to her, and she carried a large and loving one.

There was more to her, though. As I grew introspective after doing inner work myself I could sense how we also shared unworthiness and shame. Generational, deeply rooted in her lifetime by her mother, carried straight into my lifetime through mine.

Isn’t that the thing? We all have wounds to heal and we get to choose whether or not to invest in the hard emotional work of healing them in our lifetime. Or not.

I honor the sacrifices she made for me. I miss her worry for me, encouraging me to be seen by a doctor with every sniffle or ache – which drove me nuts and it’s so crazy that I miss it now. I miss her sparkly eyes and her laugh, and even her constant annoying need for me.

Ours was a joyous, traumatic, healing journey together and I’m ever grateful we had the chance to be in a relationship in this lifetime. 

The year of firsts has now ended. I’ve somehow managed to get through Mother’s Day, my birthday, Christmas, her birthday, and many pontoon rides without her. Her presence is profoundly missed.

I don’t cry every day anymore but grief is a fickle friend and there are many moments when sorrow reaches up from the depths of me to remind me that a vital chunk of me is missing.

Cheers to a big long life together, on purpose, momma. Your soul is dancing again, and mine is learning how to dance without you.