On Having it "Never Be Okay"

My mom, Eleanor, circa late 1990s.

I'm not really sad anymore on Mother's Day, which sure is a refreshing change from all those teary, Woe is me, let's have a glass of wine at 1 p.m. Mother's Days of years gone by. It's been fourteen years of not having a mom here and by this time, having my mother to fuss over and take out to brunch and buy peonies for just feels completely foreign and "other" to me. It just isn't my reality and hasn't been for a loooong time. 

I plug along. She is in my thoughts some days but I'm almost surprised to admit (and a little ashamed) that on many she is not. There was a time I don't think I could have ever imagined that I would honestly write that sentence. But there it is.

And then the other day I read this, by Cheryl Strayed:

"It will never be okay," a friend who lost her mom in her teens said to me a couple of years ago. "It will never be okay that our mothers are dead."

...Our moms had been dead for ages. We were both writers with kids of our own now. We had good relationships and fulfilling careers. And yet the unadorned truth of what she'd said--it will never be okay--entirely unzipped me.

It will never be okay, and yet, there we were, the two of us more than okay, both of us happier and luckier than anyone has a right to be. You could describe either one of us as "joy on wheels" though there isn't one good thing that has happened to either of us that we haven't experienced through the lens of our grief. I'm not talking about weeping and wailing every day (though sometimes we did that). I'm talking about what goes on inside, the words unspoken, the shaky quake at the body's core. There was no mother at our college graduations. There was no mother at our weddings. There was no mother when we sold our first books. There was no mother when our children were born. There was no mother, ever, at any turn for either one of us in our entire adult lives and there never will be.

And that's the truth. It will never be okay that Eleanor never got to meet Ellie. That she never got to eat scrambled eggs with Leo or push a ridiculously giant double stroller housing two (two!) wailing newborns down our treelined New Jersey street. 

 

And it will never be okay that my mom never go to meet Erin, but I will always be so glad that in a brave moment during one of our many afternoon phone calls (she in Oregon, me, away at graduate school in New York City) I decided to tell her about this new person that I'd only been dating for a handful of months. And because of that, for the rest of my life I’ll have a printed out email from my mom that says simply, "I'm glad you have Erin." Boy, was she right.

And the fact that it's not okay? Serves as a counterpoint to all the unbelievably wonderful and beautiful things in my life: Leo's hugs, and the way he throws his arms around my waist and holds onto me with his very soul, Ellie's witticisms and the way she will just look at me in the middle of dinner and say "Can we snuggle?" Harry's chocolate brown eyes and the way he leans in to give me a sloppy kiss and then declares, "That's a juicy one!" Lucy's blonde ringlets and watching her drink milk from a straw and eat peanut butter and strawberry jam with as much satisfaction as one would garner from drinking a glass of Pol Roger and eating Malpeque oysters. 

There is just so much beauty and joy and grace and hilarity in my life now, that the "not okayness," feels somehow easier and harder (if that makes any sense at all). Easier because I'm so busy with all these children! And my life is so full! And yet, she's missing all these children. And all this fullness. But. That is just the way it is.

 

There are so many things my mom and I never got to talk about. I was twenty seven when she died, and at that point, becoming a mother myself was the farthest thing in my mind. Who knows if I'm right, but to this day, I think one of her greatest worries for me was that I would never become a mother.

Of course now we all have a good laugh over that one. I hope my mom is laughing too.