my motherless motherhood

...and why we all deserve copious servings of remothering

I can hear myself doing it. Again. 

Running my script.  I am 30 and have never been to therapy.

Hmmm, what will I tell Bonnie this week?   Do other people rehearse for their therapists?

Should I tell her the one where we run out of gas just blocks from the mall? 

motherloss pink

So, Mom’s car was always on “E”, I would share. Not because we didn’t have the cash, but because she was so damn busy. Single mom, realtor. She just didn’t have time. Trying to get to the mall before it closed, getting my sister and I just the right snow pants or rain boots, or school picture day outfit at the Monmouth Mall before it closed at 8. This was just one of her superpowers. She could really squeeze the hell out of a day.

“Lean forward girls we are running on luck” Mom would rally.  And we played along. All of us in the front seat of her creamy Lincoln town car. “The Boat”she called it. Leased for her real estate clientele. Tipping toward the dash, hanging on the edge of the deep velour front seat, heading for the nearest station. The a.m. radio playing Neil Sedaka. We sing. Loud.    

Note for Bonnie…I wonder, subconsciously, if you know you are going to die?  I seem to rehearse all week about what I will share between our sessions, hoping to do it right. It feels kind of like being a good daughter. I wonder if I am a good client? Is Bonnie proud? Would Mom be proud?   

***

I have convinced myself that all this being sad, would make Mom pissed. She would not want me to live this way. Everyone has shared this platitude. And I believe them. I have tried. But the grief hunted me down, during my pregnancy. And made a nest.  

***

I pad into the baby’s room when I hear her rustle on the monitor. My eyes well before I enter the canary gingham nursery. The dog follows at my heel. “We are going to feed her, I tell him.  Again”.  My bones are new mother tired, but my very being seems to be writhing in bittersweet sad.

***

I go to see a therapist when my daughter, Emma Jayne is born. The joy of having a mother daughter relationship again, seems to be coated in a sticky malaise. I am trying to be happy, but I feel like a kid with a kid. I want my Mom.  Don’t all girls want their Moms’ when they have a baby?  This hum is like a tv show left on in the background. I am doing all the other things, while the grief show, drones on. 

“I don’t know how to do this without her,” I tell my husband. “we will hire someone he says”.  We have added a night nurse for a few days, he thinks it’s breast-feeding exhaustion.

***

Baby Emma is named for my mother Ellen.  She died of a brain aneurysm three years before Emma is born. I have barely grieved the concept of being a motherless daughter. While pregnant, I realize I will be a motherless mother and call my sister in panic.

“Who will help?” 

“How will I do this alone?”

I regale my therapist Bonnie week in and week out about missing Mom, even more as a new mom. A paid audience who listens to the minutiae. Who else would, or might? The only personal thing I know about Bonnie, is that she too has lost her mother. Someone advised that a grief informed therapist may “get it” more. She wears a beige cashmere cardigan draped over the shoulders of her oxford button downs and khakis—central casting for therapist in my imaginings. 

An hour with her, away from the baby, feels downright indulgent. Luxurious. Selfish.

***

Bringing Mom to life each session, is part of my weekly schtick. I am at such a loss for having baby without her motherly advice, I have landed here for answers. In Bonnie’s orbit, I notice something familiar.

I feel, mothered.

***

It’s been three years since she died.

I am suddenly starring in “The Case of the Daughter Who Never Learned to Grieve.”

Bonnie’s mom died too. Is this how she felt. Feels? Does she think I am crazy? Do all daughter’s without mother’s feel this way? I don’t know any.

With no relatives or close friends in Chicago, I leave Emma with LouLou during therapy. She is the former sitter of my neighbor. Their relocation is my gain. I always liked the way LouLou moved through the building with the kids she’d cared for, how she chatted with our dog and asked after my impending belly in our elevator exchanges. Besides the lessons imparted by my departed Mom, LouLou taught me all I knew of new mothering. She lovingly doted on Emma and called her “my baby”. This made my skin crawl.  Who was she to call her my baby? Emma wasn’t her baby. I knew I wasn’t being fair and yet I couldn’t stop myself.  Though I knew it was affection, it made my head hurt. 

***

“I wonder if my Mom was even real”, I tell Bonnie today.  Her voice was fading from memory and her death too unreal to be real.

“She was more like pixie dust in a rearview mirror” I tell Bonnie. “The fly in and fly out, sprinkle the miracles and then poof, variety”. I am making hand gestures like I have a Tinkerbell on my finger swishing about in the air.

I look up to find Bonnie with a tear streaming down her cheek. I feel like I need to climb off the sofa and give her cashmere shrouded shoulders a big squish and tell her, it will be all be ok, really.  Instead I say, “you really would have loved her”.

Can a therapist love your dead Mom?  Can she love me?

I cannot save me or Bonnie from my sad.  I can barely mother the tears of the child I had or the one hurting inside me. 

***

Seeking the remothering I have found in Bonnie and LouLou feels downright infantile. Shame inducing. It is a lesson I do not know I need back then, but counsel every motherless daughter who will listen to my missteps and every grave misunderstanding I endured from those days. Sometimes, wrapped in the warm embrace of anyones motherly advice, felt like a betrayal. Other days, a quick hit would soothe me enough to help get through another day. Resiliency felt like the “what you were supposed to be and do” without a Mom.  This post-partum reality feels like a snow globe, shaking me silly and making it hard to see the scene as clearly back then as I do now.

***

Months pass and I have fallen for Bonnie and her maternal delicacies. The warmth she radiates in the vanilla walled office is safe for rehearsing this role I have to play sans Mom.

“I imagine Grandma Ellen swooping into town” I tell her. You know, like the Grandma’s I have met at Emma’s Sing and Dance class. “She would come for the weekend, and give my husband and I a date night out or a few away from home.”

 I relay all of this to Bonnie, and she considers in silence for a beat. Pursed lips. Inquisitive.

“From what you have shared with me about Ellen, I think she would tell you to buck up.”

Dear Lord, she is spot on.  Does she have Ellen on speed dial from heaven?

I know as Dorothy does when she finally leaves Oz, I have all I need inside, I just need to believe that the lessons are in my blood and mother’s knowing.

“Buck up, Bar. If I did it, so can you,” Mom would say. 

Truth is, Ellen would be a very busy and a bossy Grandy, as she once said she might like to be called as a Grandma. She would be swamped with work and enjoying the golden years with my stepdad Peter. Nope. Grandy, would not be diving in for the save.

Even, thirty years later, when I am desperate for her advice, “Buck Up” is still tattooed on my brain in lieu of some sweet and some tender remothering.

Rescripting a life where she was the main character has not been easy. We guess at how they may have showed up or showed out for us. But, never will know the truth.

So, I sprinkle the memories of Mom on life’s great stage and perform my way forward. Mother of two now. A deep knowing that we need and deserve a big fat dose of remothering along the way. After all, nobody but nobody, should ever run lines alone.