Mom

Today, we had the laziest day I have ever experienced since Tuks came home and I didn't feel one bit guilty. The week passed quickly, and apparently I didn't have a need to say much since I have little postings.

But, today, I feel the need to mention that 24 years ago today my Mom turned 50 years old, and then 2 months and 6 days later she passed away after a 15 year battle with cancer. I have been alive 3 years longer without my Mom than I had lived with her in my life, yet as all mothers do, she left a profound mark on my life. My memory of her is from the perspective of a 20 year old, a time when one rebels a lot and is trying to find their way in life. Our relationship was not always the easiest. Though our characters and values were similar, we just had different personalities in our approach to life (at least at that time in my life), but my Mom was a loving, nurturing mother, who was extremely loyal to her friends, family and husband (my dad). She also laughed hard, enjoyed life, loved with her whole heart. She was feisty, fought a good fight (if there is such a thing) with the cancer and lived with dignity even though the illness ravaged her body with each passing year. She made our house a home, and made us a family. I would say she probably knew me better than any other living person has, again like mothers do. I miss my Mom, and my greatest sense of loss is that we never had the opportunity to enter into the Mom/daughter friend phase. I was 20, turning 21 years old when we lost her. It is like I missed a normal, sequential developmental phase, and I got stuck there looking for a mother figure. For years I have/had befriended women that were 20 some years older than me, I think subconsciously looking for that Mom/Friend guiding relationship. Naturally, it never quite worked that way.

I would also call the day she died the day that I started experiencing major internal upheaval with discontentment with my life. Nine years later my dad died and then other major happenings occurred soon after that. My discontentment lasted until this past year. I'm not saying that I haven't enjoyed life, I have had the fortunate opportunity to meet some wonderful people, travel to some incredible places, work some challenging, yet adventure filled jobs. I'm just saying that I have always felt like a chunk of me was not "there" in the moment. I was always in this land of "numbville", sad, observing from afar, waiting for that peace and inner joy to return. That's not a good way to live. If you had known me, you would have been hard pressed to see the sadness, I was good at covering it up with joviality, my true nature, so you can imagine how I hated being sad. My sadness started slowly disappearing once Tuki was home, and my family started to be rebuilt again, and I started healing. I have a ways to go, but I have also come so far.

I pray daily that my girls birth parents are protected, and healed from this all encompassing sadness that may take a hold of them because of having to place their beloved children for adoption.

I also admit, I do fear that my daughters will experience the same feelings for as long as I did from their losses. I hope my memory from my pain and losses will help me help them through theirs, so that they can grieve deeply, and thoroughly enough to be able to move on. I think sometimes we want people to get over losses quickly so that we don't have do deal with their sadness. In the long run, it does no one any good. I also hope that I can be the Mom to my girls that I feel my Mom was to me and the rest of my siblings.

Now, of course after I have become a Mom, my other sense of loss entwined with her death is that my girls will never get to know their amazing grandma. It is one of my goals to make her a memory for them by telling stories of her life.