My Mother said, I never should
Play with the gypsies in the wood;
If I did, she would say,
You naughty girl to disobey.
Your hair shan’t curl and your shoes shan’t shine,
You gypsy girl, you shan’t be mine.
And my father said that if I did
He’d rap my head with the teapot-lid.
The wood was dark, the grass was green
Along came Sally with a tambourine.
I went to sea — no ship to get across,
I paid ten shillings for a blind white horse.
I up on his back
And was off on a crack,
Sally tell my mother that I shan’t come back.

This anonymous poem was one of my favorites in a book of children’s literature my mother gave to me in the second or third grade. I committed it to heart and imagined what kind of adventures could possibly tempt a girl to risk the disapproval of a mother who seemed able to command the rise and fall of the sun (and so much more).

Sally was intriguing, but my mother was my world.

Looking back, the poem seems to have been offering me some early insights into the complicated relationship so many children have with their parents, especially as we seek to define our own identities and ambitions as distinct from those of our mothers and fathers. In my case, I’d begun to test the waters just as my mother was engaging in a final rebellion of her own.

My mother always seemed to be battling something: my father, her temper (or his), chronic illness and risks and dependencies that accompanied it — and finally, death. My parents were separated and in the middle of a not-very-nice divorce when she was admitted to the hospital that last time. Though she’d been sick all of my life, trips to the hospital had become almost routine and her homecomings something that we took for granted.

But this time was different. Veronica Magdalena Zamora died June 5, 1994, of a staph infection at Southeast Memorial Hospital in Houston. I was 14 years old.

Her death was the thing that set me “off on a crack,” never to come back, fleeing my father and the fractured family my mother left behind. Most of my six siblings had already escaped the turmoil of home, and I was last in line. I raged against my father, threw myself into school and work, and thanked God for my stepmother who helped to ease a path ahead for me. I left Houston for the University of Texas at Austin and set my sights as far as I could from home, eventually landing in Washington, D.C., and now New York.

But as the years have passed, I’ve thought less about the mother I lost and more about the woman I wanted to know in her. I wonder what advice she’d give as I discern my own vocation. I’m curious if she’d have been more or less forgiving of me, her last child, in whom she instilled such curiosity about the world and a willingness to engage in uncomfortable situations in pursuit of knowing others and ourselves better. She always had the highest standards, and could be unforgiving in her assessments of whether they’d been met. I wonder what of her is in me, the best and the worst. And I thank God for both.

I say both because what’s begun to dawn on me as of late is that I don’t have a perfectly rosy picture of my mother to adore and commemorate, and that’s okay. I have the blueprint of a life lived deeply and with consequence, where there may have been many dark moments — but with them, always opportunities for growth and transformation, with grace. My mother always said, “There’s nothing God gives you in this life that you don’t need to get to heaven.”

And I believe her.

I am the girl who was off on a crack, but as far as I’ve strayed from home, she’s kept me close. I’ve been blessed to forge an open and honest relationship with my father that I couldn’t have dreamed of as the 14-year-old girl who could find nothing in common with him. My dad will be 85 on Aug. 1, and is the most tenacious and loving man I know. I’ve also begun to embrace my unrelenting knack for introducing awkward conversations with my father and siblings as necessary avenues for healing.

And I am convinced that Mom’s here, too, cheering us all on. I think she’s proud of all of us. Not because we have the closest relationships or have miraculously become the saints she expected us to be. But because we won’t give up.