Yahrzeit

I am just realizing that fully half of my posts are about my dead parents. I'm guessing a therapist would have a good time with that tidbit...

Anyway, Mother's Day has come and gone, and with it my momma's yahrzeit. (If I knew how to embed links, I would highlight that word!) My friend Bonnie Nichols introduced me to the term some time back when her dad's yahrzeit was on my birthday. Apparently, in the Jewish tradition, the anniversary of a person's death is honored with prayers and candles and good old-fashioned mourning of the healing and cleansing variety. Great concept. It honors the loss of those living while honoring the life of the deceased.

So, I find it fitting that the first anniversary of my precious momma's death coincided with Mother's Day. It is still hard for me to think of Mother's Day as a day about ME and not my own momma, and now that it will always be marked around the time of remembering her death, I am not sure I ever will be able to let it be about me. I tried to make it about me by telling my husband, who had prepared THREE meals for me that day, that I wanted a present. It didn't feel greedy at the time because I really was trying to distract myself. In hindsight, it wasn't a very classy thing to do. Alas.

Well, my dearly beloved bought me a great pottery/herb pot (AKA the only thing they had at Food Lion that wasn't flowers...), but I bought myself a book yesterday that I had read earlier this year that is the PERFECT Mother's Day gift/slash/my-momma-died-and-I-still-hurt-all-over treat. It's called Someday and it was written by Alison McGhee and Peter H. Reynolds. You have to have this book if you are a mother or have a mother you love and miss dearly, whether she is living or not.

It's one of those I Love You Forever or The Giving Tree kind of books. It is so simply written, and SO perfectly captures the moments that define a mother's (and daughter's) coming-of-age. My favorite lines:

Someday your eyes will be filled with a joy so deep that they shine.

Someday you will hear something so sad that you will fold up with sorrow.

Someday I will stand on this porch and watch your arms waving to me until I no longer see you.

Someday, a long time from now, your own hair will glow silver in the sun. And when that day comes, love, you will remember me.

Except for the hair color I pay the nice lady to give me every six weeks, my hair is already glowing silver, and boy, do I remember my momma. The porch line makes my insides ache, as I remember how hard it was to leave her every time I went home for years, even when she wasn't actively dying-dying. Of course, it was especially hard when it really started to look like it could be our last visit. My momma would always stand in the driveway until our car was down the street and we couldn't see her any more. Something about that was such a comfort - and when she became confined to her bed, that goodbye wave was a huge loss. But, I suppose, it prepared me for the lack of good-bye waves I have now.

Man, I miss her.

So, here's a secret you learn the hard way: EVERY day is Mother's Day. Even the ones when you are yelling at your kids or pissed at your mother or annoyed with your mother-in-law - they are days that you won't have tomorrow, no matter how much you ball up in your bed and feel sorry for yourself.

I can't get my momma back, I realize that - but I can give Kori (and Austin) the kind of momma a kid deserves, a teenager needs, and an adult misses. Simple goal, right? So, to do that, I'd better close and go upstairs and love on them.