Mother’s Day, Miracles, and Grief

Unrelenting. My mother’s love was unrelenting. Even though at times I wanted her to relent, relent. Back off. Relent! But she couldn’t help herself, she was tethered to her children and to give love was to feel needed, to feel seen. It just didn’t always feel like love to me.

Mother’s Day has always come with a mixed set of feelings for me, but even moreso that I am a mother and now having lost my own. It was my first Mother’s Day without her, so I had been anticipating the day, but couldn’t have possibly known all that it would be. 

I awoke to Romeo calling my name in another room while he played… the sound of motherhood, indeed. I bent down for a hug, then spotted the flowers and balloon ‘he’ got for me. I enjoyed a cozy breakfast (thanks babe xx) in my lovely new pajamas (a tradition I will most certainly keep) and then my boys left for the park so I could be alone. 

Two days earlier, my dad had come for a visit and brought with him a few things. A couple of Mom’s hats for me to keep, an old photo of me, and an envelope of “items he found, that she’d kept all these years.”

Tucked inside was a trove of memories: The program for my First Communion, a progress report from pre-K with notes detailing little four-year-old me — “she likes to be the leader… she is the social butterfly in our class…she really enjoys a good book.” Some things forever remain…. And in the envelope I pulled out one last thing — Mother’s Day cards. All handmade by me. She had saved them all these years. It was as if she was giving them back to me - on this first Mother’s Day without her. As if she were saying, “Here, Elizabeth. They’re for you now. Happy Mother’s Day, from me.”

How I miss her on a day like today. How I wish she was here. To know that she sees me, in the trenches of motherhood. To know how much more of her I see.

Something I have resisted believing in these early months of grief, is that I still have her. That she is somehow still here. It sounds like a very nice sentiment but it hadn’t felt real.  Though slowly, in tiny, fragmented ways, the truth of that notion is dawning on me.

I’ve cried a lot the last few days. Spent some overdue time with my grief. And what I’m discovering, is that the more I release, the closer to her I feel. The more I release, the more she comes back to me. This is an unexpected gift to receive. Feeling closeness to my mother, perhaps, somehow even moreso in death is a miracle to me that I’ve yet to understand. This increase of her presence reminds me of her love — unrelenting. Quietly I think: Even here? Even now? Is it (she) unrelenting enough to surpass the bounds of death? My mother or my imagination whispers back, “yes Elizabeth, it is me.”

Thank you for never relenting mom. Thank you for still coming for me.

                                                                                                                                             photo by Ale Vidal