Mother’s Day From a Place That Aches
Yesterday was hard.
It rained on my twenty-third Mother’s Day. That seemed fitting for a mother like me — a grieving mother, a bereaved mother, a mother who has lost a child. There’s no word for mothers like me, no single term that captures the shadowland of motherhood that exists after child loss.
Whatever that word might look like, it’s not the only kind of mother I am. I am also a mother in transition, an almost-empty-nesting mother with a 20-year-old fledgling that has remarkably, miraculously, and wonderfully survived childhood.
She is grown and I have grown old. She worked on yesterday’s rainy Mother’s Day, but not before she planted a Mother’s Day flower garden that I can see from my office window as I work.
The day was too quiet, too dark, and impossibly far away from the Mother’s Days I celebrated a decade ago. I couldn’t bring myself to post to Facebook or wish many people a happy day. I sent my mom flowers. I had dinner with my in-laws on Mother’s Day Eve. I worked and folded laundry and waited for the day to end.
