remothering

duvet days, permission and other things i want for you

It still feels like a betrayal. Mine, not hers.

Mom took a much deserved day off from the summer heatwave of June ‘93 and never came home. Here one day, healthy and well and then no longer. Without warning she slipped away from a brain aneurism at Sandy Hook beach, in her sun chair. I like to believe it may have been an ending she’d written herself, albeit far too soon.

All of these years later, I can imagine her day, reenact the scene as it was relayed to me. Details garnered from A&P receipts and revisiting a spot I’d been too, many times myself. I give it the “sliding doors” treatment — if this, then that. Could I have talked to her longer on the phone? Maybe convinced her it was too hot to be at the beach that day?

But the ending is always the same.

Photo by Denis Saklakov on Unsplash

All of the pathways and daily connections that were in my life one day and were gone the next, made no sense. Today, so much good science exists to help understand what happens to the brain in grief. When the body and mind experience sudden loss and are still searching for what we lost, it is traumatic. We are continuously “recalculating” our map of reality, survival, connection and safety.

Back then, nobody said grief or grieving. They were just not words that were spoken freely. Decades later, I have made it my business, to bring grief into the daily vernacular. Folks show up in my circles and sessions for permission to grieve and space that feels safe; at all stages of life, in fresh grief and decades old loss.

I get calls about days you just need to tuck back into some serious self-care, because grief came knocking. As it does. Uninvited and unexpected. And you have every right to just be with it in any way that you wish. Permission to call in for a “duvet day” for grief, as you would the flu. That is where we should be in the world. (Welcome to my Ted Talk.)

Mother loss changed the trajectory of my life. There are ways I have reflected on this, with decades of perspective. I have met my grief and “regrief” at every age and stage myself. As a newly married young woman, business owner, through infertility and miscarriage, as a motherless mother, through divorce and remarriage — moments all of them, when I imagined her there for me. With me. I learned this void, this hole, deserved healing. No matter how much time had passed.

I lived with vigilance, resiliency and independence in her absence. The very measure of myself in the world had greatly depended on my connection to her. I forged on. Learning to go it alone. My body cried for mothering, but I could not let it in. Subconsciously, even female friendships felt frightening and also like a betrayal to her. My fierce independence looked like I had my shit together. But, I was deeply lonely and longing inside.

In the near 30 years since her death, I was awakened to a feeling I had in the presence of some great women in my life. I felt immature, even infantile when this would present itself and also like I could melt in their arms. It was a familiarity of mothering in these friendships and interactions, that I had been missing. A piece of me that exposed a stunted emotional make-up, even though I had been managing as an “adult” without her for many years.

When I recently spoke to friend and NY therapist, Gina Moffa, about her new book, Moving On Doesn’t Mean Letting Go: A Modern Guide to Navigating Loss. we touched on this. She recently lost her mother and like a few others I have dared to share this notion of “remothering” with, I got a knowing aha. Me too.

Somewhere between trying to bear the loss and learning to be in the world without them, we build a tough outer shell of resiliency and strength—and forgo the much needed “remothering” that can stand softly right alongside you. You deserve it. Let it in. Allow folks to help when you need it, ask for it. Bathe in the shower of connections that feel like being mothered.