I don’t remember my mother. Not at all. There is no hazy memory of being held in her arms. I don’t know what she smelled like, and I don’t remember her kissing me. She died when I was four months old. She killed herself by overdosing on drugs. It wasn’t an accident though. She left a note.
I always knew I didn’t have a mother. I wasn’t adopted until I was five. I spent the first few months after her death in an orphanage, some time with one aunt, and then I was moved to my father’s aunt and uncle. This was far from the end of my troubles. I was a small boned pretty child with unusual coloring. I was sad and very needing of physical affection. I was not easy to love because I was strange, and quiet, and smart. I was also hyper, never able to sit still, always fidgeting, moving, nervous, unsure, and trying to wring love out of the environment I was living in. I was never able to. My aunt, Pat, couldn’t love me. I was nothing like her natural daughter. Her bold, stocky blond, blue-eyed daughter consumed every drop of maternal moisture in Pat leaving nothing for me but harsh words, and assurance that I was completely unlovable. Not that she ever said that of course.
“I love you, I just don’t like you,” I was told so often.
So, I don’t remember my mother. I don’t remember any mother. It left a furious need in me. As a child, starting around seven, I would sit in my room and create a mother. My mother. Pretty, easy to talk to. She could sew, bake, cook, and dress stylishly. She became a companion, at times when Jesus and His Mother were not enough to get me through.
With each age came a different longing. At seven or eight, I wanted to be held, and touched and told I was beautiful. As I got a little older, I became focused on terms of endearment. Pat would call Trish ‘Honey’ and she called her husband ‘Babe’ but she never used a sweet name for me. I asked her about it after school one day.
“Why don’t you use a term of endearment for me?” I asked. I did use that actual phrase. At the time I asked she hemmed and hawed, but later that day, she got mad at me.
“You lazy bitch!” Then she threw back her head and laughed her harsh smokers laugh. “There’s a term of endearment for you, Lazy Bitch!” Seventeen year old Trish looked away from her mom and down at the table where they were both sitting.
As I entered my teens, my thoughts about my mother focused on facts about her. How old was she when her period first started? How big were her feet? Was she pretty? Did she read? I knew nothing at all. I had seen no pictures, and had only Pat’s terse information that, “She got sick and died.”
In my later teens, after I found out how she died, it was only, always, “Did she love me?” I would never believe she did.
I waited for the pain of this fact to ease. I thought when I got older I would get over it, but I never did. When my son was born, I worked on becoming the mother I created. This helped a little, but it was like taking an aspirin for a headache that was so fierce that the pain leaks through the medicine. When my daughter was born, I would hold her and weep little tears onto her tiny down covered scalp. I would whisper into her head,
“No one has ever loved me as much as I love you.” As more children came, and my husband and I were busy, my pain faded to the background. It has not lessened in intensity, it just isn’t important anymore. I have become an excellent mother. I read everything about parenting I can get my hands on, and I chose a good mate, a good father, who was raised by a good mother who helps me find the way when I get lost. My husband’s good mother has become like a mother to me. I forget though. I forget to call her when I am sad or sick, and this hurts her. It’s not personal; I just don’t know how to be a daughter. I know how to be tough. I know how to bake, sew, cook, and decorate. I dress well. These are lessons I learned from my mother, because they are the things I thought a mother would teach me. These are the things I teach my own daughters, and my sons for that matter. I love them fiercely; always fearful that they may lose me the way I lost my mother.
The other day my thirteen-old daughter was asking me about losing my mother.
“I think you’re lucky you were so little, I mean, you can’t miss what you never had right?”
“Well, babe, if you lost me right now it would hurt, but you would have memories of me. You know what kind of movies that I like, and how I dress. You know what my perfume smells like, and how old I was when my period started. When you got sad, you could think of me, couldn’t you?”
She agreed. She would have memories, which would carry there own kind of pain, but it would be a very different pain than the pain of not remembering at all.
