Dear Mama

Hey mama, it’s been 12 years since you passed away and there’s not a day that goes by that you’re not on my mind. I’ve written you a lot of letters and I’ve told you a lot about what has been going on in my life since you left this world. With so much that I’ve been able to say to you in the time that you’ve been gone, there is also something I was never able to tell you while you were still here.

Before you passed away you knew that I was carrying resentment towards you because of the conflict we had in those last few years of your life. You tried to apologize to me and make up with me so that we could rekindle our relationship, but I never gave you that chance while there was still time. When you died I went through a tough process of forgiving you even in death for what unfolded between us in life, but after your funeral and the good memories that were recalled that day I was finally able to lay down my bitterness later that night and forgave you and I realized I never hated you, I just had some hard hearted resentment that I was too foolish to let go of at the time. Through all of what I held against you, what I never told you was how much I wanted to make up with you, as much as you wanted to make up with me.

In my mind I told myself that I wanted nothing to do with you anymore before you died and that I didn’t care what happened to you and never wanted to see you again, but no matter how much I believed this in my mind, my heart was not so convinced. The truth is my heart did want to reconnect with you and I did want us to be close again. In the back of my mind the greatest part of me always believed that no matter what, we would be close again and this is why it was so easy to tell myself that I didn’t care about you anymore and never wanted to see you again, because it felt like it was fate that we would be back together again, no matter what I claimed to want or didn’t want.

Wanting to truly have a relationship with you again isn’t something I realized was still in my heart at the time you passed away. It wouldn’t be until the years after that I would realize how much this is what I wanted. The way this discovery found me came in the form of the dreams I would have at night when I slept and the conversations I would have with other people when I talked about my life with you in retrospect. When I go to sleep at night, some of the most frequent and reoccurring dreams I have are about you. I often dream about you still being alive and having deep conversations with me about what has been going on in my life since you’ve been gone. From the things I have a accomplished in the 12 years since you departed, to all the great people who have come into my life as friends and family that you never had the pleasure to meet, these are the conversations that I wish I could have had with you while you were still here.

Dear mama, I know it was your greatest wish for your son and your two daughters to reconnect and be close again like you raised us to be, and as much as you wanted to be close with us, we wanted to be just as close with you too.