Yesterday was the two year anniversary of my mother’s passing. I felt off and tender all day, and was honestly quite grateful when it was time to put the kids in bed and simply find a space on the couch next to my husband and be.
I miss my mom. It is a strange truth in the midst of my memories of our relationship. The space she left behind is not a warm place that can never quite be filled, not one that aches for comfort. It’s something else, something marked by a longing I carried with me even when she was alive. But it is there, and while I do not go poking that bruise very often, I always know it’s there. Her absence is part of me in the same way that her presence was when she was alive. She was a powerful force: of love, of passion, of determination.
If you know me in real life, you know that so much of my life as a wife and a mother has been purposefully shaped by my desire to be other than my own mother. It sounds harsh to say it, but anything less would be dishonest. My mother proudly proclaimed that she never backed down from a fight, and this was true. She saw admitting defeat— or choosing not to step into a battle at all— as a sign of weakness… and weakness was the one thing she could never abide. As a child, I came home after more than a few fistfights and scuffles and was never reprimanded, only asked if my opponent looked worse than I did. Later, after one too many calls to the principal’s office, she amended the rule to this: “Don’t start a fight. But if someone picks one with you, you’d damn well better finish it.” I accepted this as solid advice until I met my husband, the first person to show me that true strength lies not in winning a battle, but in loving others enough to to fight in the first place.
I did not become the woman I think my mom always hoped I would be. Honestly, I’m not sure what her dreams for me were. She was notoriously tight-lipped with praise for her children in our presence, and what I do know of her thoughts on the woman I became has filtered to me through the words of others. She loved me. I know this solidly. She was generous with that fact, and I don’t doubt its truth. But as to what she really thought about her daughter who chose to forsake the opportunities the world presented to her in favor of following a call to serve a husband and a house full of children… I really don’t know.
I see echoes of my mother, and I know it would make her happy. Birdie loves to embroider, something my mom did when I was very young. I see my sweet daughter delight in it and wish I could have mom over for dinner to use the cloth napkins her granddaughter has so carefully stitched with little squirrels and hearts and initials. I decide to bake a cake just because, and I smile knowing that’s her doing, because food equals love, and that was always her way. Little phrases, little knick knacks, little pieces of the good seeds she scattered in me and in my family pop up from time to time and I am blessed to see that as time has gone by, the Lord has been faithful to show me that my mom can and will be remembered as more than perhaps I had feared in the worst years of our estrangement or the hardest seasons of our differences.
My mother was fallible. Oh, goodness, aren’t we all? She was not the world’s best mother, nor was she the worst. She was who she was, and I am in a place where I give thanks for that. She was one of the tools the Lord allowed that shaped me to become my own fallible self. No doubt my own children will (and already do) look up on my shortcomings and wish I was more, or perhaps wish I was less. Love, after all, is only perfect in the form we see exemplified in Christ Himself… and not even the heart of a mother can manage that. I so desperately wish I could. But I can’t. And two years on, I have a deeper understanding of the fact that my mother most likely felt the weight of her own insufficiency to love perfectly just as palpably as I do each and every day.
I miss her. I wish she was here to meet Decimus, to see how tall Jemmy has grown, to show all of her neighbors Jack’s Basic graduation photo, to drive me crazy giving me the details for a twenty-five step recipe she saw on the Food Network on the phone while I try to edit a kid’s essay. But she’s not, and I’m coming to the place where that feels normal, somehow. I have confidence I will meet her again in heaven, and that when I do, it will be with so much more grace than I was able to extend to her here on earth. Perhaps this is the gift of her passing: I have learned more about my mother since she’s been gone than I ever understood when she was alive.