Today, if she was still alive, my mother would be 90. Bless you if you have parents that have lived this long – I will say, I don’t think my mom ever wanted to live to 90 – she made it to 86 and I don’t think she was super happy about it. I found a letter once when I was 10 that my mom had written to no one in particular about how she knew she was going to die at 50 because she saw it in a dream – mind you, she was only 45 when I found it, so imagine going through those little kid years thinking your mom is a seer and knows when she is going to die, and it’s soon. That was…not cool, keep that shit under lock and key so your sensitive, literary, and morose child does not have more reason to become all the things she will become. Alas, I became.

The stories I share of my mother eke out of me like a slow, annoyingly drippy faucet, which is diametrically opposed to how I thought this was all gonna go – after she died, I thought I would write down every single story I ever remembered about my mom, good and bad, gushing out of my brain onto paper (ok, digital paper) like Niagara. That has not happened. I wrote an outline of all the stories I wanted to remember right away. I’ve not had the…ability? to write these stories in full. Talk about disappointing myself, even though no one is putting pressure on me to do this except, well, me. It feels like I am ignoring her on purpose; that she doesn’t deserve it, and it doesn’t deserve my time. And while it feels like that, that feeling is a lie. If nothing else, my mother was the Master of the Guilt Trip, so I am pretty sure she reaches out from the columbarium to remind me of my own personal failure.

And of course, this makes her sound like a terrible person in life. Not true, and we all know this – parents are tricky, complicated, and there are millions out there who do not engender those feelings in their offspring, but there are also millions more who do. They leave those unsolved Rubik’s Cube feelings up to us to navigate, in life and in death. It is hard, and yo, I was never good at that fucking thing, and I guess I’ll be trying to solve it for the rest of my life.

I’ll end with this story:

My mom loved cards, sent in the mail, ya know, like we for real barely do any longer. From knee-high, I remember going with my mother to the card store (those were a big thing – not so much anymore) to look at cards for what seemed like hours. It was probably not. She was a Hallmark Gold Crown Member, ensuring for every bajillion cards she bought, she would get a free one. Christmas cards, you can imagine, were a giant production in our house – would they be embossed? Would the envelopes be foiled? How much was appropriate to spend? How many did she need to send out? Answers to all of these questions were different every year, but there was a good 5-10 years when she probably sent 50 to 100 cards at Christmas. Always tasteful, never a picture of the family, and never never never a dreaded “Christmas letter.” Man, she hated those. She thought it was so tacky. Which, weird, right? You’d think you would want to know how your friends are doing, but not Mom. Kind of fit with her whole vibe though – not really sure she was the one who wanted kids in the first place, so why write about us, or read about others? The cards she would send would never have a personal note really, just like one you would get from a business with her and my father’s name either signed or even printed neatly by the Maker of the Cards.

That’s it, that’s kind of the whole story. But it sums up my mom pretty well – concerned with appearances and not brave enough to get remotely personal. As I get older I realize that “brave” is really the right word, because for her, the personal was not always pleasant. Was she happy? Did she love us? I think the answer to that was dependent on the day. After all, she was a human with unresolved trauma, just like most of us. Would I have preferred a mom who was more open with me about her feelings, gentler with mine, more understanding of her own psyche? Sure. What I got was an education. I got the knowledge of how I didn’t want to be. Paradoxically, also of how I did want to be. What the fuck do I do with that? Contradictions within people are hard. She was smart, fun, creative. She was angry, sad, lonely.

I got all of it. I wouldn’t trade it.

Thanks Mom. I love you. Happy Birthday.