a mom('s) hug

Being a motherless mother is hard.  I feel like I’m just winging motherhood—almost like a game of pinball.  But instead of the flippers to propel me in a different direction, I just go down the hole.  I wonder often if my mom were still alive would she be my flippers?  Help me get back on track?  Be the boundaries for me?  

My dad is wonderful, but he seems to have no memories of me as a child.  When Gianna does something sweet or fun or completely irritating, I wonder If I did the same thing.  And how did my mother handle it? My mom was always good with documenting our lives in scrapbooks. In her final years, my mom dismantled my baby book to re-do it.  Problem is she had dementia and half the photos are now missing and the rest are out of order or mislabeled.  It’s a great metaphor to how I feel sometimes.  Lost, disoriented, confused. 

It’s challenging not to be envious when I see other mothers shopping with their moms or dropping the kids off to spend time with Grandma.  I read an article the other day where a stranger saw a woman crying and approached her, wrapped her in a hug and said “you look like you need a mom hug”.

BOOM. Yes! A mom hug.  I give those to Gianna all the time.  The “it’s going to be okay” hug. The “I’ll take care of it” hug. The “I’m proud of you” hug.  I don’t get to experience those hugs anymore. I didn’t even know I was missing them until I read that article. Well, I knew I was missing hugs, but not all that defines a mom hug.  It doesn’t matter how old we are, we never outgrow the need of a mother, do we?  I suppose that’s why there is such a void when our mothers transition. 

I have a vivid memory of sitting in my peach bedroom on my white iron daybed.  I was 12 or 13 years old and crying about what someone said to me.  Or didn’t say to me. Or looked at me.  The preteen angst was off the chart in those days. My mom was sitting next to me, her arm around me, offering me motherly consoling.  What I remember is not what she said, but how she made me feel.  The same with another memory.  It’s the last memory I have of my mom while she was still ‘all there’.  She was in the early stages of dementia, but she showed up for me that morning.  I was no longer living at home, but had stayed the night with my parents one weekend.  I woke up in the basement to some very unsettling voicemails on my phone.  I just started weeping.  My grief was intense during this season of my life.  I remember my mom, after hearing my cries, coming downstairs to be with me.  She sat down on the bed and put her arm around me and just hugged me.  I hate that’s the last true connection with her that I can remember.  Me grieving and her feeling helpless to make it better.  I wish it were that we were laughing and sharing something uplifting.  I need to find a new way to look at it so that I feel comforted and not haunted by this memory.  

Friends are wonderful mom stand ins.  I couldn’t do life without them.  But sometimes there’s no replacement for your mom.  After yet another set back in my cancer treatment, I was on the phone with my then 84 year old dad telling him what had happened.  I fell to the living room floor crying and I said “I just wish mom were here.”  “Me too”, he said.  

I could really have used a mom hug in that moment.  Truth be told, I could use one today.