Dear Mothers #12
For A Mother Without Her Mother
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Dear Mothers,
I am at a loss at how to parent through grief.
It is May 2022, my son—and second child—is two months old, just barely starting to give me those longer stretches of sleep. My mom and dad come over, chat about the weather, what we had for dinner, then sit down on the couch and reveal that my mother has been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Three to six months. I ask if it is a joke. Who jokes about something like that?
When my son is five months old, I take him to see Nana one last time. She already asked that we leave my daughter at home so she won’t “remember Nana this way.” She is so thin, so unlike my sturdy, hardworking mother, her hip bones jutting out of the sheets.
We say goodbye to her as she says hello to Heaven. She waits for my sister and I to go home for the night before she dies, like she doesn’t want us to see her last breath. Moms, right? Always trying to shield us, right up to the end.
The funeral is, as expected, horrible. My two-year-old daughter screams if I leave her line of sight. My husband has the stomach flu, and I solo parent my way through it. I drive us home to Texas with clenched teeth as I try to explain how alone I feel, untethered but also surrounded by unmet needs.
Now it is December. My son is eight months old, and my daughter is three with big feelings. I am limping through the holidays, my capacity for magic-making absolutely stumped. I do not bake cookies, do not watch The Family Stone. Sadness permeates it all. My daughter says regularly, “Are you sad about Nana?” Always, sweet girl. Always. When I get out of bed, I count the hours until I am back in it.
And now, in February, my father is getting remarried; my son is just shy of eleven months. I am livid with rage. I’m crying at school before my students show up. I understand that parents get to handle their needs, that we all just try to survive, but I cannot separate myself from my childhood. I snap at my daughter. I have no capacity for gentle parenting. I feel undone.
So my question is this: how do you parent when the problem with parenting is … you? How do I get through this? How? I can’t ask my mother.
Sincerely,
A Mother Without Her Mother
Dear Mother Without Her Mother,
You wrote this letter many months ago, and even re-reading it now, your words instantly transport me back to my own experience—different than yours in so many ways, and yet, the ache is all too fresh and familiar.
I was not a mother when my mom died. I was just eighteen, starting out in life, graduating from high school only days before she died. No longer finding my footing as a new adult, I felt like everything I knew had fallen apart.
My mom, too, died of pancreatic cancer. A terrible disease. A heartbreaking diagnosis. It was also so very quick; it can still take my breath away.
From her funeral, I remember the hazy glow of the walls, tan with peach and pink tones, and the nauseating smell of stargazer lilies. I remember the first December without her, seven months later, when Christmas felt empty and aching. My dad gave me my first cell phone—the size of a car battery—because instead of going away to college as originally planned, I was still sleeping in my childhood bedroom, commuting to a university only fifteen miles away. He wanted me to have a phone “just in case” and I genuinely smiled at this gesture, in what felt like the first time since she died.
Half a year later, my dad told me he was getting remarried. I was eating breakfast, and without warning, teardrops fell into my bowl of Froot Loops, like rain in a puddle, over all the compounding loss and change.
I became a mother ten years later, and ten years after that, had a full house with four kids. Once, when my second child was four or five, he watched me load groceries into the trunk from the back seat of our minivan. His chubby cheeks rested on his hands laying flat underneath his little chin. “Do you miss your mom?” he asked, seemingly out of nowhere.
Plastic bags hung from my hands, my heart dropped and my throat closed tight. Tears filled my eyes—it’s always just right there.
“Yes,” I could barely answer him. Oh sweet boy, may you never know this grief. “Yes,” I offered him a heartbroken smile, “I do still miss my mom.”
I cannot pinpoint the exact date it started, but what I remember clearly is how years later, I began to rage. After so long of managing, keeping at bay, making space for grief on Mother’s Day or my own birthday—but otherwise neglecting—a season began where a deep, deep well became a fire I could no longer keep contained. What I’d worked hard to ignore, hold in, deal with when it crept out here and there, began to burn bright. And it was my children that felt the heat the most, these precious kids who would still snuggle up tight, ever willing to get burned so much was their love for their mom.
“You need to get some help,” my husband said one day, almost twenty-five years after my mom had passed. After yet another explosion with my kids.
Out of spite, out of desperation, out of needing to talk to a professional my entire adult life, I said, “Fine, I will.” And then I sought out a counselor, admitting my embarrassment that so much time had passed since her death, truly honest that I’d somehow still been able to create and enjoy a really beautiful life, and most of all relieved—to have the permission and space to finally, finally, deal with what it feels like not just to lose a mother … but to live as a mother without one.
It’s been almost a year since you wrote in. And another December is here. I’m wondering how you are. Is getting out of bed easier? Do you have space for the magic of the season?
I’m also wondering if the rage is still there. If instead of learning to manage it, dealing with the consequences when it refuses to be ignored, you’re open to looking it in the eye? Making space to confront the grief that you carry? Because so much loss and change can feel impossible for one person to bear alone. I actually think it is impossible to bear alone.
As I sit here and think of you, I also say a prayer. For your heart. Your kids. Your marriage. And I wonder if you, like me, are trying your best with the life-long work of mothering your kids without a mother, of holding joy in one hand and grief in the other?
I am so sorry for your loss. I wish it weren’t this way. I wish we didn’t have to live such a bittersweet life.
But I want you to know you’re not alone. In your grief. In your joy. In your laughter and your sorrow. In all of it, you are never, ever alone.
With love,
A Fellow Motherless Mother
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