Dear Brave Ones,
I have been missing my mom lately. Not because of Mother’s Day, but because of Cinco de Mayo. Mom used to stay with us and make terrible margaritas for the neighborhood. We’d sit around card tables on the front lawn and laugh, drinking the margaritas anyway.
Then the Met Gala was Monday and no one texted me to say which dress was stunning, which ones totally missed the mark. And I missed Mom.
Now the displays at Target tell me it’s Mother’s Day and I imagine that so many of us are missing our moms right now.
When Mom died almost a year ago, then my stepmom six months later, I felt an immense gap, a hole, a silence. There was relief, too, that they were no longer in pain. Yet there was no escaping they were gone. They were “lost” as we say about people who have died, but I was the one who felt lost. In my sadness, there was no one to turn to for Mom-like advice or unconditional love.
People would tell me that soon, I’ll see my dead loved ones everywhere. One friend said he sees his mom in the misty morning fog. Another friend sees her dad in every mockingbird singing. I went on countless hikes, looking for Mom. Is she this pink wildflower? This tall pine? This osprey gliding over the water? If I’m honest, I didn’t feel her presence anywhere. I didn’t believe that my friends were telling the truth.
Instead, all I felt was Mom’s absence. I heard an announcement for the French Open tennis tournament (Mom was a huge tennis fan) and went to text her about it and stopped, feeling a tightness in my chest. Mom, my text buddy, was gone. I was at the hair salon (my stepmom Janet loved her hairdresser and jokes) and a woman told a dirty joke. No one understood why it made me cry. All I could think was, I will never hear Janet’s voice again.
But back to Cinco de Mayo. I’m standing in the kitchen, trying to remember the margarita recipe, and I have one of those simple epiphanies, an “Aha!” moment that feels like a “No Duh” moment. These pangs of missing the people we love ARE the signs that they are everywhere. I might not feel Mom in the mountains, but she is definitely on the tennis court, at the table doing a crossword, or filling my glass with a terrible margarita. What if I can hear Janet’s voice again? What if that was her in the hair salon?
“The world I live in and believe in is wider than that,” says Mary Oliver. “And anyway, what’s wrong with maybe?”
What if I opened the door a little wider to the idea that the relationship continues long after they’re gone? Instead of wincing in pain when I am reminded of them, I’m leaning into it. Yes, to feel the sorrow, but also to delight in what they delighted in and feel their closeness.
This Mother’s Day, what if I go get my hair done and intentionally invite some friends over for margaritas? We could tell dirty jokes. Maybe it would make me cry because my moms are not there, but maybe it would make me laugh, too. Our dead loved ones are so much nearer than we think.
Once I had this “No Duh” moment that flipped my focus from the lost to the found, I could hear Mom everywhere and it felt good. On Tuesday, when my daughter declares that the men’s tailored suits at the Met Gala this year were stunning, I smile at how she sounds exactly like Mom. On Wednesday, when I walk past Hydrangeas in blossom, I hear my stepmom’s voice say, “I could sit and look at these all day.” Yesterday, when I am meditating in front of a little altar I’ve created with pictures I love of Mom and Janet, Mom interrupts to say, “Please get a better picture of me. That one is awful.”
And when I can’t take the ragged edges of grief, I’ll remember that I am held by other mamas– Earth Mama, Sky and Moon Mama, River Mama, Mountain Mama, and Mom’s favorite, Guadalupe, Divine Mama. I might even walk the trails with a margarita in hand, toasting Mom, Janet, and all of these powerful mamas, saying Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Love,
Susie