mary, mother of the motherless

mother's day is rather terrible when you are motherless. In a year, in a day, in an hour, there are reminders left and right of your loss. of her, she who has all the answers. she who is gone. no day is more full of those reminders than mother's day. Especially when you are not yourself a mother and there are no evolutionary prospects to make you one.

i try, though it is difficult, not to think of her on days like this. the darkest days. try and try as i might, she is in my mind, non stop, my mom. in life she had a big personality, sweeping gestures, dramatic responses, the resemblance sometimes is more than i want to admit to. i wonder, i wonder all the time, if she had lived, would we be friends. would our role reversal, i the parent to her ailing child, would that have made for a friendship. i think it would have.

i dream. i dream of mary. mother mary. mary, mother of the motherless. mary, like my sister, like my grandmother. fragile women all of them. i dream of mary telling me it's ok, and giving me a green light, only i don't drive. what the hell does that mean?

since she has gone, i watch t.v. movies geared at middle aged women, about middle aged women getting a second chance, starting over, rediscovering their high school sweetheart in the wake of their crumbled marriage or recently benign mastectomy. i watch these movies as a way of morning the second chance that seem to evade her. i read novels about women's journeys. journeys to rediscover their past in the middle of their lives on the longest days. you know the type of book i'm speaking of-high quality middle brow fiction by the likes of Elizabeth Berg, Jane Hamilton, and Kaye Gibbons. novels with titles like, Never Change, A Map of The World and A Virtuous Woman. i watch these movies, i read these novels, despite my alterna queer 20 something indie cred, because they connect me to moms, to women of her generation who made good, to the hope i think that lived inside her.