Whatever Held

My mother died at sixty. My kids were six, four, and two. What came next, in order: a divorce, single motherhood. And about nine months after we lost her, my father moved away. There was still some family, technically. But asking the few who remained came at a cost, one way or another, in ways I could see or ways I’d pay for later, and it was never a cost I could afford. So I stopped asking. That’s the reality of those years. Three children. One income, mine, and no other. A court case running in the background like a second job. Medical appointments a third. And nobody to call.

I want to tell you who she was, because otherwise the absence is just a hole and you can’t see what created that enormous void. She was the fairest person I have ever known. She lived her life based on what was right and not what was easy. She loved people even when she didn’t agree with them. She listened even when she was too tired to listen. Everyone was welcome in her house, any day, any hour. She was silly. She gave, unselfishly, every single day. And she knew what to do. That’s the part I miss the most, not just the love, but the counsel.

Here’s a small one that stays with me. I was a teenager, and she was driving a carload of girls home, song girls, the ones I cheered with, and they were gossiping the whole way, the way girls that age do, and I was in it with them. She didn’t say a word while they were in the car. She waited until every one of them had been dropped off. And then, quietly, she said something like- girls are going to talk. That doesn’t mean you have to
join in. That was her whole method. She didn’t shame me in front of anyone. She didn’t lecture. She waited, and she listened, and then she said one true thing, and it landed, and I’ve carried it my whole life. That is what I lost. Not a babysitter. A compass.

I needed her in the tiny apartment, in the lowest financial years, when I was so far down emotionally I could barely see the surface.

I needed her when I was living with a boyfriend and the second custody fight started, and I had to decide alone whether to scrap the whole thing, the move-in, the house, or see it through. I saw it through. I made that call by myself, without her to talk it out with, and I have never stopped wondering whether she’d have told me something that would have changed it. She usually knew the right thing to do.

I needed her when I came home from the hospital after sepsis, a ghost of a person, hollowed out, and still had to get up and take care of three children, because there was no one else who was going to.

I needed her at the very beginning, walking straight out of cancer treatment into court and single motherhood, trying to heal my own body while getting three kids to school on time.

Every one of those was a night a woman calls her mother. Every one of them, I didn’t. For years I measured myself against her mothering and came up short. She was so good at it. She was patient in ways I couldn’t manage, generous when I had nothing left to give, calm when I was coming apart. I felt like I was drastically failing at the same job she had done beautifully.

And then, at some point, I did the calculation properly or maybe with a little more distance. My mother had her mother. She leaned on her for guidance, for emotional support, for the ordinary steadiness of having someone older and wiser to call right up until a couple of years before her own death. She had a net under her the whole time she was raising us.

I had no net. I had three kids, sole financial responsibility, a hostile ex, my own body failing me, and not one person to ask. I wasn’t failing at her job. I was doing a different one, with none of the support she had, and then punishing myself for not making it look as easy as she did.

I don’t say that to take anything from her. She earned every bit of who she was. I say it because it took me years to stop comparing two things that were never the same, and I would like my own children to know it, in case they ever find themselves measuring their lives against anyone else’s.

Here is what I know now. She listened when she was too tired to listen, and I got three kids to school when I was a ghost. She gave unselfishly every day, and so did I, with nobody refilling me. She led with her heart, and God help me so have I, even when it cost me.

I became eventually a lot like her. I just had to do it without her.