Dangermond.org

My mom died five years ago today (Nov 30), she would have been 79 years old on December 28th, but she did not make it to her 74th birthday. When she was the age I am now, my father had been dead for five years and she was still adjusting to an unmarried life and empty nest. She was a natural beauty both inside and out, but fear had held her back most of her life. Like a lot of us in my family, she had anxiety issues, she hadn’t learned to meditate, and she didn’t know how to be. I inherited all this restless person syndrome from her – the pacing in your own house, the inability to go anywhere without the pressing feeling that you had to go back to where you came from and so you couldn’t relax and be where you went to – it’s this insanity that I have tried to overcome.

When my mother was dying in the hospital – a process that took six long months – she had a tube in every orifice and she called me over and barely able to breathe, much less speak, she whispered to me, “I thank God for you every day.”

Mothering is a bitch – because no matter what you do your child is going to hold you accountable for just about everything that goes wrong in her life. She’s going to hold you to task, she’s going to check you from the time you get up to till the time you go to sleep, and there is nothing that can be done about it. And then one day you are going to die and your child is going to miss you as if a vital organ had been removed from her body.

My mother is responsible for my son’s presence in my life. She died and he appeared. There are no coincidences in life. And I thank God for him every day. This mothering stuff is not for pussies; it is the feeling as one person put it of having your heart outside of your body walking around independent of you. It will bring you to your knees.

And here I find myself on this fifth anniversary of your passing Mom, on my knees, thanking God every day for you.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2014 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.