On our first morning in Barcelona I woke up at 3am crying to thoughts of my mother. The memory that rushed to my mind was when she used to work at Detroit baseball stadium for a summer or so to help make ends meet. I have a mind full of vivid memories. Jason is always surprised at how visceral my recollections can be. In any given memory, I can remember how the sun felt, the heaviness of the air, the gentleness of the breeze or the cloudiness of a subdued living room light.
I thought of my mom with the warm sun behind her, eclipsing her face on a Michigan summer afternoon during a rare visit to the stadium while she was working.
Whenever I think of my mom or my dad, I think of their smiles and laugh first. Both of them had specific gregarious laughs. But my warm memories of mom soon trailed into how unhappy and sad my mother was through much of her life…which made me sad as a child.
Mom’s sadness wasn’t obvious while she did her best to do her motherly future, but I remember watching my parents from a very young age. I’m very observant, I take subconscious note of everything that is happening in a moment and this is probably why my memories are so visceral. I think I’ve always been empathetic or what people call “emotionally intelligent”. I could just feel people from childhood on including my parents. My mother could be very jolly, but looking back with more language & understanding, I think what I watched as a kid was a lot of depression and sadness from my parents as they carried on with their undealt trauma. And this observation really penetrated me from early childhood.
This is a lot of us. So many of us have so much baggage or trauma from our past that we unintentionally pass onto children that we don’t think understand or can see. But we are watching your every move and interaction inside family walls, no matter how young we are.
I try to view my parents less as flawed parents and more like humans with a past who were trying.
This doesn’t justify anyone who's been abused in any way by their parents or family, I’m just saying so many of us have complicated relationships with our parents, but when we become older or have children of our own, we begin to see maybe it wasn’t as easy as we thought it should be.
I’ve never pretended my relationship with my mom or dad didn’t come with challenges, just like so many of us have. Sure, my parents did things to hurt me and maybe they weren’t always there in the ways I needed most, specifically during the onset and post diagnosis of my disease, but I love them just the same.
My mother was a fearful person and I wonder if this observation led me to living life like I do, because I wished my mom could have fulfilled so many of the dreams she had, though, I know she loved being a mother, and that was a dream of hers, something I won't get to do (out of my own choice due to my progressive illness and lack of local familial support). So it's a tradeoff. We all have something that contributes to our sadness. But still, I knew my mom had more dreams but often limited by her own fears and insecurity.
When both of my parents passed (they were divorced) what made me the saddest was how lonely they were. Neither had committed partners at the end and this idea of them feeling lonely always brings me to tears because I understand how loneliness feels. I’ve felt it my whole life-perhaps lasting remnants of being an orphan and other things.
I love you and miss you, mom. Dads are great, but I have a special place for mothers who so often sacrifice and are left with much of the work, something I watched a lot.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the amazing moms out there, we couldn’t do life without you. To the moms struggling to raise children in poverty and the mothers in constant war torn areas, fiercely trying to protect their children. To those who are motherless & fear this day as it reminds them of their non-existent relationship with their own or never having a mother to begin with. To those expecting, those struggling with loss of their child and to those struggling in the trenches of infertility, desperately trying to become a mother. ❤️
