April 26, 2013
Rambling Thoughts on a Life Unfinished
I won’t try to be too existentialist about this, but when I
see human tragedy….the Sandy Hook shooting, Boston, the car accident that I had
to detour around on my way to work…I feel it differently now. Similar to how I saw all other children from
a new perspective after P was born, but in a more raw/sad sort of way. Being a
parent and losing a parent is a hard combo…one that a lot of the world goes
through in a lifetime, it is the natural progression to become a parent and to
hopefully outlive your own parents (and hope that your children outlive you),
but I just was not ready. At all. We were supposed to be 62 and 82…silly old
women who had figured life all out….my mom was supposed to get a chance to take
a deep breath and relax a little. Not 52 and 32, I wasn’t ready.
I can’t just write a few sentences and explain the person my
mom was…or how backwards it is in my head that just when the chess pieces were
lining up again for her, it was all gone.
My mom did not have an easy childhood, or adulthood for that
matter. Her mom (my maternal grandmother) was killed in a car accident when she
was 12. She was one of six children in a
farming household in Indiana. There was
not much money and her father (my maternal grandfather) was overwhelmed raising
a house full of children on his own. My mom met my father in high school. He
is, I suppose, the love of her life, but he is also a soul draining person…that
a life of being married to him resulted in a fatal heart attack should not have
been a surprise. She was pregnant with
me at 19 years old and had me when she was 20.
I remember turning 20 and telling my mom how mind blowing it was that
when she was this age, she was a mom….and a really, really good one too. One of
my humanities classes in college covered early childhood development and
psychology. I was so amazed that techniques in my college textbooks for
nurturing children were the exact things I remember doing with my mom as
child…she was so natural at loving children. I had such a good mom. My father struggles at being a human being,
his moral compass is skewed. He did not deserve the effort that my mom poured
into his life…she did not deserve the stress and heartache that he poured onto
hers.
My mom was The Giving Tree…and some days I look back and I
want to kick myself for being the selfish child that took and took without
realizing the tree was dying, and some days I know that my mom probably would
not have had it any other way. She was
my horse show mom, birthing room masseuse (the epidural made my legs cold and
tingly), best friend, sounding board, logical counterpart (at times I was hers),
and the person who would follow me down a rabbit hole of a tangent that only we
could understand (she was at my house last summer watching the Olympics with me
and we had an extensive conversation about what Olympic sports we could still
participate in…somehow, don’t ask how, we settled on synchronized swimming…it
only made sense to us). We spoke on the
phone several times a week…I am not generally a phone person, but we could just
talk…I don’t have anyone else in my life like that, I am often stuck inside my
head these days. (ßSee?
There I go again being selfish)
And she loved P…like as deeply as I loved him, she loved
him, and he loved her. He lit up when she was around. The Sunday before she
died, she came to the house to watch P so J and I could have a date night for
his birthday. She came in the early
evening, P was in his high chair in the kitchen and she walked through the
garage which opened into the laundry room and he could see her from his chair…he
smiled the biggest smile and just bounced with happiness to see her at such an
unexpected time. Like the greatest thing that could happen to him is to have
her walk through the door. It physically hurts when I think that enough time
has passed now that he probably doesn’t remember her and that he is missing out
on such a wonderful person in his life.
When the topic of having another child gets brought up, I struggle with
the thought of having a child that will never meet my mom, I struggle with the
thought that the perfect delivery day scenario of my mom staying home with P
and making him feel incredibly special and presenting the idea of meeting his
new sibling in such a perfect way, and helping with the transition….will never
happen. I feel like I want to tell P “Sorry kid, you are just stuck with us
now” and J and I’s nurturing skills combined don’t hold a candle to how my mom
was with kids.
So…the day my mom died she had a job interview with a
company that was subcontractor in big construction. It was an accounting
position. She was so excited, she was
incredibly qualified for the position, she had been out of work and looking for
so long that she was feeling very defeated and like she had ‘aged out’ of being
a competitive in the job market. I learned after she passed that her finances
were in dire straits. I knew things were
very tight, but it was worse that she had let me know and this job came at just
the right moment. Also, the previous week she had also been paid back a loan by
a friend of hers from several years ago, money my mom never expected to get
back…out of nowhere she paid my mom back.
So it kind of just ‘felt’ like things were going to be okay, like it was
all starting to come together. Just before 11am on Tuesday, August 14th
2012, I received a call from the company my mom was interviewing with…my mom
had me saved as ‘my beautiful daughter’ in her phone…to say she had collapsed
during her interview and was taken to the hospital but was non-responsive when
she left. I remember so many details from that day. I remember songs that
played on the radio during the hour and a half drive to the hospital, I
remember the way she looked, I remember her hands, I remember the brief moment
when J walked into the room holding P and I could see the spark of recognition
in his eyes when he saw my mom and telling J to take him away. I also remember my stupid logical brain
running itself ragged trying to find the ‘reset’ button. There had to be a way to undo this, there had
to be.
Over 8 months later and my brain still does that. How can
this person who loved life and children and me and my son not be here to see
him grow up? How is it that I remember how she felt, what she looked like, what
she smelled like, but all I have left of her are ashes and pictures? I want to
turn back time and give her the shoulder massages she was always asking me for,
or hold her hand in the car more often, hug her just a little longer, and
listen with my intuition and know that she needed more help than she was asking
for. I hate…like it makes me physically ill…that I know that her heart gave out
because of stress, and even though I was not a direct cause, I could have been
helping, I could have been more in tune with what was going on. I hate it.
Looking back, I wish we had had children sooner. I know
anyone can examine their life and go ‘if I had known where I would be now, I
would have done things so much differently’….but I definitely feel that way. If
I had known that I would not be pursuing a scientific career right now, that I
would be working in an office with a friend from college, then I would have
gotten the ‘I must control the schedule of my life’ stick out of my ass when J
brought up children years ago, if only to give my mom more time to be with
them. P is so different now…he is a toddler now, he runs, his personality
changes every day….and my mom would have loved seeing him growing up so very
much. She would have called me just to discuss the latest cute thing he did and
happily would have let him babble in toddler speak to her on the phone (one of
his favorite things to do – but most people, including me sometimes, don’t have
the patience to have fake conversations with an incoherent toddler on the
phone).
My best friend is the talker in our relationship and I am
the listener. My mom’s best friend was the talker in their relationship and my
mom was the listener. I think (hope) that my mom felt like I was a listener for
her as well as her for me….but when I try to look at it in reality, she was
probably also my listener too, so I could have a relationship where I was the
talker (which makes me sad because I don’t want to think that my mom was always
the listener….everyone needs a person where they can be the talker). My husband
thinks he is a listener, but he is not. He is a guy. He wants the Cliff’s Notes
version of all things, not the 20 pros and cons of what the hell to do with my
horse. So while I know I can call my best friend, or my mom’s best friend, or
talk to my husband….it is just awkward, and not natural, and it feels like I
need a lot of set up to make them understand what the hell I am talking about.
It sucks. This sucks.
How is that for rambling and being sad? I think I am going
to set this aside for right now. I could keep starting new paragraphs with
snippets of memories or why my mind just won’t accept that she is gone, that
she won’t walk through the door one evening while P is in his highchair and
life will just give us another chance….but it cannot be good reading and it is
emotionally exhausting. So for now I need to post this and revisit the
individual thoughts and stories as we go along…..life unfinished.
