I saw her today. Maybe I had been thinking about her, but I doubt it. She was standing next to the floral department at my neighborhood grocery store and I stopped to do a double take. The wind was knocked out of me and that feeling overcame me as it used to so long ago. I must have stared - I must have. But no one noticed and the world continued moving and the other patrons skulked over their fruit purchases as I looked at my dead mother standing there. It all washed over me and it was like it was almost exactly ten years ago when I would see her. In the airport, on the street, moving through the halls of my university. And only suddenly then, when I saw her likeness, did I think, “What would she do?”
My mother’s approval is one that has been constant after her passing. A stressful starter marriage, a sudden pregnancy, a life of strange choices based on other people’s wants and needs. It’s always there in the corner of my mind, but today has been a first when I acknowledged it. What would she think of everything that has happened? We all have tendencies of feeling like a failure, but I never truly did until she died and I could no longer ask for her words of wisdom or comfort. There is no supportive banter in the background of court dates and thesis presentations. It all died with her.
Sometimes I have imagined asking her what she thinks of decisions I have made in the past two years and if she would be proud. My father will insist she is while my sisters will persuade me to remember her mantra that the most important thing is to be a mother -- a great one at that.
I used to imagine that she would appear to me in the night and say, “There, there, you did the best you could before I died,” but it never happened. I used to think that people haunted us, but I think now that it is really the words we never said at that last unknowing moment.
I regret seeing that woman today. I didn’t need the reminder of that time, almost exactly ten years ago, where I would swear that I saw her almost everywhere I looked. But never quite quick enough. Never right on the second. I wrote a story for a class during that time of finally accepting my grief about how I actually searched for her in a drunken stupor off a long plane ride where I swore I saw her meandering through the airport. My professor told me it was not my best writing, while my friend in class suggested something larger was amassing in my head.
Today though. Today was a day when I needed her. Maybe she was there. Maybe she was simply reminding me that we just do the best we can. We don’t need approval from our mothers or friends who cannot commiserate or people who ignore the past. She was there and she smiled. Whoever it was, she smiled and I could breathe.
That’s all for today. Happy Tuesday. xx