Mourning the Mother I Never Knew

I sometimes wake up feeling that my mother has visited me in the night. I have memories of a shrouded figure just standing quietly and watching me sleep, or a pair of kind eyes appearing out of the darkness. I don’t know if it’s true or even possible; I’m not a religious person, so there is no built in belief of such things. Perhaps it’s just me wishing I had another chance to spend time with her, to laugh with her, tell her that I love her. Maybe I need to apologize to her. Maybe I need to tell her that I forgive her.

For everything.

My mother was a drug addict throughout my childhood, so as a kid I never got much time to spend with her. I knew what it was like to have your mother love something more than she loved you. She’d go weeks or months without seeing her kids, but the drugs, she loved every day.

There were days when I’d wake up, and my first impression of the world was just how sad I was living in it. I’d sit up in the bed, first thing in the morning and all of me would be washed in tears. It drained me; it was hard to get up and begin such days.

An addict's ambition is simple, to get high again. And again. My mother was no different. We kids always had to be taken in by some relative, when we were lucky. By the time she was finally able to kick the drugs, leaving the rest of her for the alcohol, I was already in my twenties; life had had its way with me, and I was past the point in life when someone might’ve kissed my knee if I fell.

I was awkward with her. She didn’t know how to be my mother; she’d missed the training. I didn’t know how to be her son any more than a wild weed knows how to be in a garden. I’d never been around her during those early times in life when bonds are built with a parent. And then, during the time of life when most people are first going out into the world on their own, shedding the skins of childhood, my mom was trying to make up for lost time.

She told me she loved me, often. I loved her too, but the confession of it was hard for me. I hadn’t grown up having people tell me that they loved me. Those words were awkward in my mouth, chunky and hard to chew. They seemed to have gone down the wrong pipe.

There were times when I snapped at her, when her years in that life made her say things that embarrassed me. Her ethics weren’t always in line with my perception of right and wrong. I think I spoke to her as if she were a child.

In those times, I knew that I was wrong for speaking to her that way, but I couldn’t find a way to make myself feel how I should’ve felt about my mother. Simple love was all I could manage. She never argued back or disagreed with me, I guess she figured it was her punishment, and so she took it, like lashes across the back of a proud soldier.

In her mid-sixties, she had a stroke. She’d already been diabetic and had problems with her heart. She suffered from depression and, I suspect, guilt. We had to put her in a home because the doctors said she would need twenty-four-hour medical care, and none of us could afford to do it privately. She was bedridden; she’d already lost most of her hearing, and it seemed that overnight she was an old lady.

I hadn’t always felt comfortable spending time with her, but now, I felt what time I did have left had been stolen. I had been cheated. When I visited her, I had to write notes to communicate. And her vision eventually deteriorated to the point where even notes were near impossible.

When my mother had been in the home for more than seven years, there was a Tuesday morning when my phone rang at 3am. I’m a light sleeper, so I was up right away, but I just lay there in the bed, propped up on an elbow, and watched the phone ring. It finally stopped. My heart beat like a hammer in my chest. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the phone. I think I knew who was calling and what they were calling about, from the first ring, such calls have a certain tone to them, but I prayed for a wrong number. The phone rang again.

My mother had died in the night. Everything in me was broken. I hadn’t realized the capacity of my heart to love her, in spite of everything, until that moment. I cried, violently. No one could give me back those days of my life that had been stolen. I was an orphan once more. I belonged to no one.

All the things you have done to hurt someone’s feelings, come rushing back to you when you have no more time to apologize. I wished I had visited more, and I wished I’d been able to tell her how much I loved her in spite of everything, and I wished I’d thought to tell her that I forgave her. But I didn’t. Honestly, the thought never occurred to me. I’m ashamed to admit it.

I’d never really known her, not like a son should know his mother, but I wished I had. I didn’t know what her favorite color was; I didn’t know what her favorite song was, or what movie star she’d had a crush on when she was a girl.

She’d never cheered on an eight-year-old me as I attempted to blow out all the candles on a birthday cake with just one try. She’d never packed a bag for me and sent me off to summer camp, only to spend the whole time worried out of her mind. She’d never helped me get dressed for the school dance.

She had never checked my homework or watched me play sports. She’d never grounded me or spanked me when I messed up. There were times when I saw her on the street and was embarrassed to admit that she was my mother. I didn’t always remember her birthday, because I’d learned about it late. In dating, I used to hear women say you could tell a lot about a guy by the kind of relationship he has with his mother. Crazy.

But I loved her, more than she could’ve even known, more than even I had known. If someone had asked why I loved her, it would’ve been a question I could never have answered. There was no evidence I could’ve presented, no home video footage, no scars that she had mended, no tears she’d kissed away.

Standing over her bed early that morning, after the phone had kept ringing so long that finally, I surrendered to its call, I clung to the memories of each of the days we did have together, knowing that many would fade with the years.

Holding her hand, I whispered these things to her, hoping that the dying doesn’t happen all at once, and that maybe there was something of her still there, trailing behind the rest, that would know how much I love her, that would know how much I would miss her, some part left behind that would know that I forgive her.