Many Ways to Love (lose) a Mother

Today a new friend asked me about qualities I had inherited from you and I responded by saying that we would have to have this conversation at another time.

I felt a well of emotion rise up inside of me and as I drove home, I drove passed my namesake: the Iris gardens.

No. I did not curse you. All I felt was love.

It is a love cradled in the comfort of loss. But knowing that you have been birthed from that cradle and will one day reunite. (Knowing well that reunions come in many forms.)

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There are many ways to lose a person.

I chose not to speak of it because of my love for you. But it has squandered a part of my heart and kept me small.

Recently, I read a woman’s account of how she is slowly losing her mother through the devastation of Alzheimer’s. My heart ached through most of what she wrote. (The family vernacular alone: a mystery for more than ¼ of my life.) At the end, she posted lyrics which you used to sing to me and it was truly something to feel into. All of that love. And all of that loss. Cradled and birthed in mystery. All of these 48 plus years. 

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I’m not walking around guarded or angry. I’m not feeling self-righteous or owed.

But there is something I am walking around doing.

Protecting you.

I have been protecting you.

I don’t tell people about this 14- year silence. About the tikkun made 4- years ago which lasted barely a year and the decision you made to move on again in your life without me as a part of it.

Mostly, I have remained silent. I have touched upon this a bit, here, in this forum and recoiled from doing so more and more and more and more. That is on me.

I am innately driven towards protecting you (and my sister). I am driven towards protecting your choices in every possible way. 

  

Announcements are made about executive orders and I am still protecting you. The you from 45 years ago. The you who may potentially live another 25 years.

This is my own covenant without you.

I am a family of one.

It may not be the natural order of things, but somehow, this is what remains from what was given.

So does my love. And so does my forgiveness.

For years and years, I used to think that the world lied about families. About the ways families were meant to be yours forever.

But I no longer believe the world is lying. I had just been hurting each time I saw a film or a commercial or an intact family beside me at a restaurant that embodied that breathtaking quality of love. But then I taught myself something brave: to keep loving my way through every holiday, birthday, anniversary and even every surgery. 

I knew how to love others. And, as a family of one, this was what there was to do now.

Here is what I believe now: I believe we ALWAYS have what is ours. My heart has been through Olympic Trials many times.

You are my family even though you do not choose me. I may not be yours as you do not choose me.

For I am a family of one who loves many. 

I don’t define myself by loss or by what has been lost. I define myself by what keeps giving back to the source of the heart that beats love. And I am always going to want to be intimate with what those things are.

I am a family of one who loves many.

I am a family of one who loves many.

I am a family of one. 

And I will never stop 

loving.

3.1.17

Jill Bacharach