That’s My Mom

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”
~ Richard Bach

Yesterday was the 40th year anniversary of the loss of my mother. She passed when I was three. My brother was a 9 week old baby.

When you grow up without a mother, each day deepens the realization that you must walk through life alone, slightly different than every one else. Such a huge loss leaves you searching for mentors; you spend your life looking for others to show you the way so that you can do things right. You develop abilities that people will say make you dynamic. To me it is just survival, an earnest desire to make a life my mother didn’t get a chance to have.

I am a motherless daughter.

My daughter reminds me each day of my life’s purpose and promise . She never lets me forget that I too had a mother. Every day, and in the most uncanny of ways, she keeps my mother alive. From the questions about my mother to the small moments on the long drives to school when she asks me what I remember about my mother, to the fortuitous spotting of a butterfly when she’ll invariably chirp, “There’s your Mommy, Mama. She stopped by to say hello to you today.” I white knuckle it through these moments. I smile, knowing that the voice of my mother is coming through loud and clear through my daughter.

My mother was from the Phillipines. She barely spoke English when my father brought her to the United States via the military. She left 10 brothers and sisters in a land that no longer exists due to vicious volcanoes that wiped her homeland like a smudge from the planet. She carried a red leather bound pocket size Webster Dictionary everywhere she went, crocheted madly even though she had dibilitating arthritis, always had a chocolate cake on a pedestal for other military wives that would stop by for chit chat and coffee in the percolator; the same percolator which today gives me an instant flashback whenever I hear the slurping sound that particular type of coffee maker makes.

We never wore shoes in the house, we always napped together in the big bed, and she dressed like a lady every day. She would put her hair in the teethed pink rollers, after she smoothed on the Dippity Do (hair gel in a jar from the swinging 60’s!) and tied a scarf around her head. That scarf pulled it all together and she always looked magnificent. I remember her saying, “No matter what you feel, put on your best dress.”

I live by these words to this day and, believe me, they have helped me through some impossible moments. I can look polished on the outside, even if I’m crumbling under the skin. Fake it till you make it, you sure were right about that, Mom.

I often wonder how many days you had to fake it, because the sadness I feel sometimes is just so overwhelming. Thank goodness for that perfect black Ann Taylor skirt tucked in the back of my closet.

Throughout the years I’ve searched each day, deep in my heart and mind to keep her alive. I try to make choices that I hope she would be proud of. I have those moments when I want to reach out and call her. I long to ask, “Why this…How do I do this… What did you do when…?”

Fortunately, I have the hand of my best friend and husband, Sean, who is the top dog to help me in these moments. However, sometimes in my search, I felt that, even as much as he gives, there is nothing that could ever replace my mother.

That was, until my daughter was born.

Mia will be 8 tomorrow. She is a testament that time heals all wounds. I believe with all my heart that she is a gift from my mother, sent to me so I could find the best mother inside me. Mia keeps me grounded, bonded, and humble. One of the hardest and sweetest days of my life was the day my daughter was born. Not because of the labor and inevitable aftermath, but because my mother wasn’t there to hold her and bond in that experience that connects women.

However, I was surrounded by Fillapina nurses that showered me with more love than most may have received that week in the hospital. And I had the comfort of the nurse telling me, “Your mom is here with you. You are holding her in your arms. No other person in the world besides you, your brother, and your children will have her DNA.”

I hold those words deep in my heart and live by them daily.

Thank you Nurse Leona.

Every day I search. I want to learn for myself how to be the mother I most want to be. I look in the mirror and say, “There she is.”

My mother will always look back at me as long as I take time to see the reflection, and remember to pay it forward for my children so that they will not know anything other than, My mom loves me and doesn’t dwell on the have nots. Only the freedom that life gives us to evolve, just as the caterpillar turns into a butterfly.

I love you Mommy, and I live each day to be the person you were, and the person my family will be proud to say, “That’s my mom.”

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