parts, whole
I'm writing to you from my family vacation in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I happily seem to have lost all sense of time.
This is where we go every year. We have some of the same fights, some different ones. We marvel at the natural beauty of the landscape and our family's inability to mirror it. We feel resentful and grateful and claustrophobic and lonely and trapped and free.
This is a place I went with my own family since I was a baby and where my mom went her entire life as well. She died on August 3, 2008, and her memorial stone is situated here - by a long, stone jetty - a beautiful place she chose herself, right at the edge of the world.
The first time I visited her memorial "as a mom" myself was in 2014. My son was ten months old, and "mom" still felt a bit like a role I was playing. A very consuming role that I had to get right, that involved a lot of self-sacrifice and breast milk and confusion and anxiety.
When I visited the stone that first time with my son and then in the years that followed with both of my kids, I felt awkwardly aware of the part of me the wasn't only their mom, but a daughter too. The part of me that was missing someone she really loved and wanted and maybe still needed.
Nope. It was too confusing. I wanted to convey (had to convey) to my kids that I was very happy, fulfilled. That even though I'd lost my own mom, that I (their mom, their person) was here and solid and not needy and un-haunted. I didn't want them to be sad for me or afraid.
If I'm being honest, it was self-serving too. I was sick of being sad, I was sick of missing her, of holding memories rather than experiences, close to my heart. I desperately wanted to be a person without loss hovering over her shoulder like a ghost. I didn't really know how to be the mom part and the sad part at the same time. So, goodbye sad part!
I still had moments in which I grieved and allowed myself to miss her, but the more constraints I put around how and when I could mourn, the less I did it. The less I did it, the less access I had to the memories, the feelings. The less access I had to her.
I have been trying to shift that. This year at the memorial stone, I finally talked to my mom. I told her I missed her. I cried. I did all of this in front of my family. They didn't shatter, they understood.
Silently, I welcomed back the ghost of loss and invited her to hover over my shoulder. She is here, keeping me company, and I am hopefully more whole for it.
Are there parts of you that you've hidden from your kids for so long that they are now inaccessible? What are they? Do you want them back? What did you gain by shedding them in the first place? What have you lost?
