As Mother’s Day approaches, there were so many topics that I thought about writing about but it kept coming back to my own mother, Joan. I lost Joan, who had become my best friend over the years, 14 years ago and there still are so many days I wish she was here. To ask her advice, settle a dispute that my brother and I have about our childhoods, watch her granddaughters become such incredible women, discuss the TV shows we watched together (I am still watching “The Young and Restless” in honor of her!), take her to her favorite restaurant or Potowatomi, or to just sit with her. She is missed so much.
Again, there is so much I could write about Joan but I think I am going to go with the theme I have been using for the birthdays and use one word to try to describe my mom. The word I am going to use is SURVIVOR.
There have been many conversations that I have had with people about religion and spirituality and when it comes to discussing heaven and hell, I have always said that life here on earth can be a form of hell. I say this because I do not believe that my mom could ever be sent somewhere else that would give her more pain and sadness than she endured here on earth.
First, there was her childhood. My mom grew up with two alcoholic parents. She only let me into a sliver of her experience. She did not talk about it at all until I was well into my adult years. I thought that was just because she did not want to open up wounds but as I got to know my mom more as an adult, I realized that she really wanted to preserve my perceptions about my grandparents. She got out of Ashland as soon as she and my dad got married so she did not have to endure the day to day with her parents any longer. She could have kept going and never looked back but she maintained her relationship with her parents and fostered our relationship with our grandparents. We took yearly trips up to visit them and every Sunday she got us on the phone to talk to them. When she began to tell me stories of her childhood, I questioned to myself how she continued these relationships when they hurt her so much as a child. Maybe she understood that it was a disease? I wish she was here so we could talk more openly about it now.
She went to this alcoholic house to a marriage to my dad. They loved each other deeply and as a child I held my dad up on a pedestal, I still do for many reasons. However, as I learned more about relationships and my own parents’ relationship, I realized that my dad was not always the easiest person to live with. My mom was the peacekeeper in our family and my dad had a temper so if there was anything that was going to set him off my mom did everything she could to prevent this. My parents also took on very traditional gender roles with my dad working and bringing home the money and my mom basically doing everything else. She cooked, cleaned, paid the bills, planned vacations, and did almost all of the child rearing. I always wondered how my dad would have survived if my mom would have gone before him! I don’t remember my mom ever doing anything just for herself when we were young.
Then there was my mom’s health. She lived until she was 79 but there were many years of health issues that she had to contend with. It started when she battled breast cancer when she was 54. She had a full mastectomy on her left side. They also removed her lymph nodes. I was a self absorbed teenager at the time so I don’t remember a lot about this. I just remember my mom being in the hospital and when she came home there was this apparatus that she had to hang on the closet door that she had to use everyday to help raise her arm and get full movement back. She did not talk much about this throughout her entire life. This was only her first cancer journey. Several years later she had bladder cancer and had to have her bladder removed. She lived with a bag that she wore at her waist that she had to empty on a regular basis. This really impacted her travel and her time spent with Maddie and Marah because she was extremely self-conscious. Her last bout with cancer was sebaceous small cell carcinoma that took her right eye. She lived the rest of her life with a patch covering the hole where her eye once was. In between her bouts with cancer she also had a heart attack that led to a quadruple bypass surgery. She fell and broke her hip during the last 6 months of her life and this ultimately led to her death. My mom fought through all of her health issues and maintained a positive attitude through them all. She often felt guilty that she continued to survive such medical issues while others did not.
These physical issues are enough to carry the survivor title but what my mom went through emotionally through her life is what merits being a survivor even more. Besides her traumatic childhood my mom lost my sister to suicide and then six short years later she lost my dad to cancer. Losing a child is difficult enough but the guilt that my mom endured as a result of my sister choosing to end her life could bring any parent to their knees. To this day I don’t know how my mom got through that but she did, for us. She knew there were others who were depending on her and she had to find a way through the darkness. Then, the loss of my dad so shortly after this. He was her best friend and her entire world revolved around him.
My mom lived on this earth for 22 years without my dad and in those 22 years I saw a woman recreate her life like no other. A year after my dad died, she moved out of the house that they raised us in and bought herself a condo in Racine. A community she did not know at all. She became a part of the board at the condo association, she joined several bowling leagues, played cards with a group of friends, made new friends, nurtured the few friendships that remained after my dad’s death, traveled throughout the United States, was a great grandmother and mother-in-law, and became my best friend. There are many people who would have gone down a drastically different road if faced with everything that my mom faced in her life. I know one of my mom’s biggest fears was that she would turn into an alcoholic like her parents. She knew that was in her DNA and she fought like crazy to make sure she did not use alcohol or any other substance to get through the darkness. She survived and survived with grace, compassion, and love. It is my greatest hope that she now lives a life of peace, happiness and she feels no pain like she experienced here on earth and her and my sister and dad are together.
Whether you are a mom yourself, you still have your own mom, or you have lost your mom, I hope you all take some time this Mother’s Day to honor, remember, celebrate the moms in your life.
Being a mom is not for the weak. It is an incredible responsibility but it gives you a love like no other. Happy Mother’s Day everyone!