MDweeps

Today is Mothers Day. I feel awful.

The well-known pop psychologist Dr. Phil believes our lives are shaped by ten defining moments and five critical people. I believe he is correct. I know it is true for me.
The death of my mother was one of those ten defining moments in my life and my mother was one of those five critical people in my life.

My mother's death impacted every aspect of my life and affected the whole course of my life. Everything I am today, every belief I hold dear and the whole direction my life took was a result of my mother's death. I was young when Mom died. Dad remarried a divorcee with two children younger than I was and a year later they had a baby girl together - my pretty half sister. My step-mom was ok, she was fair with me and kind, but she loved her own kids tons more. That was ok. She never gave me preference over one of them and that was ok too. I was just there and I never gave her trouble and for her that was ok. I was smarter than her kids and exceeded in school to such a high level that it blew her out of the water. I inherited my parents' genius genes. Dad is a doctor and Mom was a biochemist.

Mom died of cancer, her death was long, painful and cruel. I wished it never happened; it was one of those debilitatingly painful events in life that are so impossible to recover from that you wish you could turn back the clock to a time before it happened and never have live that event ever.
Even now, so many years later I can't talk about it or let myself remember it. I don't want to really. Sometimes the memory comes back to haunt me in a nightmare; the memory of that final night in the hospital when Mom lay in a coma and I prayed for her to die because there was no hope left of her living. Her eyes were taped shut. I don't know why. I wanted to die too.
Her death was a relief. No more suffering. She was free. I was free. I wanted to have engraved on her headstone the immortal words of Martin Luther King, Jr. - "Free at last, Free at last, thank God almighty I'm free at last." That didn't happen.

Life went on. I finished high school in three years, went away to college and finished in three years with an academic medal of honor, eloped way too young, went to grad school, got a Masters in Anthropology, then a Ph.D in Anthropology. Never accomplished a lot with any of it except I can put Dr. in front of my name. And that is my special secret that I hide from the world. Big deal, right? I'm still me, still missing mama and still bleeding from a wound that will never heal, still wanting more of what I don't know I want. There is more out there to achieve, but what? What I have accomplished is not enough; there's more out there I can do. But what will have meaning? I started a motherless daughters website and left it half completed, I don't like it the site, it would have meaning if I completed it.

The last few months I've been missing Mom more than usual. I'm feeling the weight of my grief like a millstone around my neck. I can't tell anyone, even those who have lost their own mothers I feel isolated from. I went on a vision quest in college - I am ready for that again. It may help. I write prolifically, poetry, blogging and journaling mostly. It no longer offers me the comfort it had at one time long ago. For 15 years I've met monthly for breakfast with a group of other women; now I don't feel I belong anymore. My best-friend of 18 years annoys me now.

Its Spring time here in Maine - the promise of new life rising in me slowly takes shape. Just like last Spring and all the Springs before that. This year just maybe it will be different.