There’s a line in the song “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran that asks “Where is the life that I recognize?” I have been asking myself this question every single day since I lost my mother to cancer. Who the hell am I? What the hell has happened? When my new therapist asked, “Were you and your mother close?” I immediately said, “No.” Life is so f’d up.
The fact is, for as much as my mom blabbed about many things, she wasn’t always very open. She kept many including her own kids, at arms distance. The more I grieve her, the more I realize how much I really was like her. So, yes, I was close to her. Probably closer than most.
The photo above is very haunting to me. For both of my boys, her presence was very apparent in the hospital delivery room. In a way, it was kind of her day too. She always wanted a girl. She won’t be here to meet her girl she’d been talking about all this time.
Never complain about your mother. No matter what, you don’t ever get another.
In 7 weeks, I will be at this very same hospital delivering my very first girl. I will do so without the girl responsible for making me. No, my mother wasn’t always that person I felt I could go to for advice. But, she was my mother. She handled shit. She taught me to handle my shit. And now she’s gone. I have no idea how to handle shit anymore.
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