Mother’s Day… my mom killed herself rather than see the sunrise on another Mother’s Day. It was just two days since I had taken my last final in my first semester back to university after eight years of being away. I had been busy, to say the least. But in those two days, I had spoken with Mom three times, planning when we would see her and what we would bring to the family celebration at my grandmother’s house. She never gave me one hint of being off in those conversations. And I knew what off for her sounded like.

Yesterday, I simply didn’t know what to feel. I have feelings that I am told I should not be carrying. I have feelings that I myself don’t want to carry. And I have something in me that wants to go on and be a mother instead of mourning my own. Yet last night as I fell asleep, I said the word “Momma” and realized how foreign it felt on my tongue and what an ache it produced in my heart. For those of us who have lost mothers, no matter what age we are, Mother’s Day is really a reflective day.

Yesterday my husband’s grandmother was remembering her mother. The only child of six that survived, she and her mom were very close. Except in one way. Faith separated them. While my great-grandmother-in-law was a dutiful Christian all her life, her daughter never felt any need to go to church and yet it was required of her. She’s shared this story with me before, always exhorting how she never felt right in going for the wrong reasons which for her were because her mother told her so. It occurred to me for the first time to ask her if she ever thought about going for the right reasons. This flustered her quite a bit, and I never got an answer as she returned to the story and its familiar litany. I said a little prayer for her own individual faith.

It was really hard to sit and listen to her though. I wished someone would listen to me. And people have. You know who you are and I thank you. I’m just not one to bring my concerns up into a conversation and have subsequently discovered that I like people who bring it up for me. I must have been taught too well to put on a good face all the time. Because when I share my struggles with anyone, I feel like I’m whining and should straighten up and shut up and go on and deal with it.

Too, sitting there with my husband’s grandmother made me think of my own grandmothers and how I used to listen to them and how I thought they knew me and loved me. Because just as I was listening to a broken record of sorts in front of me, I had to listened to two others many times before.

And just as this one hadn’t really heard me when I said something from my heart but was content on continuing for her own need, I remembered that that’s how both of my grandmothers reacted when Mom died. Neither offered much in the way of consolation – instead they used the occasion to their own purposes. One to justify her son divorcing my mother and the other to beleaguer me with requests for sentimental items she had given my mother.

Mother just isn’t a word I like much these days. Except in my desperate attempts to try to be some shadow of one to my own children.

Sister. Now that’s a word I like. My sisters in Christ who are more precious than jewels.

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