Dear Mum,
You talk more to your Facebook story than you do to me. If I’m being direct, I automatically assume it’s due to some level of shame. Either that, or you just don’t like me, as you’ve told me before when I was staying with you in Searsport. I love you, mum. But how little does that affect us anymore, when the essence of your commitment is shackled to a couple of words in a Facebook message, every so often, whenever you feel guilty enough?
What are you waiting for? Families fall apart on any given day. Even the strongest flocks of birds fall out of the sky when left alone too long. It’s like they forget why they’re flying in the first place, if not for the lasting resource of a family’s love to keep them afloat together. And are we humans any different?
You might prefer to fly alone. Or with other flocks that allow you the freedom to express yourself without limit, that enable your toxic thoughts to find new foundations. You flock to those fountains with those other creatures, and together you drink from waters I cannot find, and cannot hydrate myself from. And I know what those waters do to you.
How many words are required to reach you? Is there a riddle I must answer that might reveal the location of the mother who cares about who I am and what I’m becoming? In what order must I design the approach to get through to you?
In the same way I wish I could have reached my father before it was too late. And how I’ll never fully process losing the people I love, as it’s happened, and as I suspect it will happen again, because for so long it’s been a process of losing them while they hover above the grounded experience of their natural lives, escaping their bodies and the troubles that have collected like individually folded traumas that never surface long enough to be contained.
So, thanks for checking in, I suppose. But you’re still not getting what I’m trying to say. You’re not willing to sit in my heart and mind for long enough, maybe because it makes you uncomfortable. But how can you escape what is your blood, and that blood is my own? It is not your doing alone that has led us here, and allowed me to adopt this weight that deteriorates my spirit every time I face it alone.
I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I’m offering you clarity. I’m telling you there is nothing to uphold. My primary concern has been, and always will be, your health and your spirit, and your ability to feel proud calling yourself my mother. Because I’ve always imagined that if you could feel that pride, it would give you the strength and determination to keep reaching for what you pray for every time you talk to God.
So I’d ask you again, mum. What are you waiting for? Do you realize how short our lives are? Do you realize how our minds work, that even if we’re given the gift of growing old, when the day comes for us to pass, our memories will not hold us together? It will suddenly feel like, although we’ve been alive for very long, in those final moments, we cannot call what we’ve lived to the surface. And those memories become nothing but shifting images in a sea of passing lives, both yours and mine. A finger snaps. The hourglass fills at the bottom. And the people we love, we can no longer remember their voices.
And I think you know that even after all that time away, however much you’ve convinced yourself you remember, there would be something that pleasantly surprises you in the way you’d all of a sudden recall a forgotten facial expression, a tone of voice. It’s the finite little things that build the foundations of all love. The things that go unspoken.
I say all this because there have been more times than I wish to recall where I’ve felt a sinking feeling in the center of my stomach. The feeling that I will not be seen. No matter how it’s sliced. Whether it’s at rehab. Whether I’m waiting for you to get home from “the store.” Whether I’m waiting to hear from you through a jail-line phone call or a hand-written letter with a hand-colored picture, filled with words like “Bud, when I get home we will…” Even in the things we’d say to each other to remind me that you remember the moments when things felt right, and we were truly close.
Not the kind of close that is a Facebook message once a month. Not the kind of close that uses needles in my bathroom while I’m asleep, and runs from me every time I demand some form of truth.
Do you secretly assume that I’d rather you not be around? Or do you maybe believe that I’m not worthy enough of being a child you could love so completely that you’d stop their worries, and make sure you were present and healthy, purely because you are proud to be their mother? Because you understand that your family was given to you by God, and what that means for the responsibilities that follow?
I know you understand what kind of mother God has asked you to be. I know you are capable of being a person who does not leave me to harbor all of this alone. And I never thought you were the type of person, the type of mother, who would love something only from a distance.
I know that I’m not. I cannot allow myself to abandon those who care for me, especially when I care for them.
I’m not better off without you. There is no one on earth who can fulfill what God’s purpose is for you as a mother to what family we have left. And don’t you want to preserve what little life remains for us all?
Even if we were to age for a thousand years, when that final day came, and everything we loved and were bonded to was on the line and ready to go cold, wouldn’t you wish, even then, for another year? So you wouldn’t forget. So you wouldn’t let go of what you feel is in your blood and in your people.
Isn’t it beautiful that you have God, and that he’s given you the chances? And isn’t it tragic that still, I carry the weight of your absence? I can remember you. I accept you. But I cannot fathom why you cannot accept me.
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CAMIGULA D STEPHENS