Dead Moms Club

hello grief, you're looking like a bitch as per usual

{Trigger warning: this is a serious essay about my late mother. More nonsense in the lovely Sabrina Carpenter silly way soon.}

Last Monday, March 31st, was the tenth anniversary of my mom’s death. It was a day I would have, potentially, have spent some time being contemplative, but life got in the way. My kid didn’t have school and my husband was home with a case of shingles that wasn’t just some awful rash but had hit up his nerves in his ear, meaning that he was on day eight of so of a searing head pain, so mom-duty was the order of the day. And I felt fine about it, I did.

In my experience with grief, the anniversary dates that have a bite come around and say hey, it’s been a year, how are you different? How are you the same? Do you remember this person? The sting can lessen with time, and it has. You always miss the person, but the intensity of it can change. The spring brings with it a slew of loaded dates for me, including my mom’s death anniversary, and her birthday. She’s always on my mind in some way at this time of year.

But I also think that for me, my mom’s death happened, and then I became a mom five years later, and once I was a mom, that’s when I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and that’s when I was in active mourning for her. I missed her. She has been very present in early days of motherhood, as a voice in my ear, a gentle, sainted ghost murmuring the right way to do things. I balance it out by thinking well, if she had lived long enough to meet her granddaughter, she wouldn’t have been able to see her much, if at all, and she would’ve been in terrible health. She would’ve been as much of a memory as my grandpa was, which is mostly one houserobe that stunk of cigarette smoke.

But none of that justification, these other mothers, fighting it out for attention all in my head, made up for the fact that she wasn’t there. While I try to be open about talking about it because it happens to all of us, loss, and I’m tired of the catholic tradition of squeezing everything down until it comes out in some bout of self-hate or destruction, I realized that with my friends who are also new mothers I may be the person with a dead mom who can’t stop talking about it and I want to sometimes say oh, that’s not me, it’s just … situational. Because we’re all moms now and becoming a mom has you thinking about your own mom all the time, and I can’t bounce anything off her, and I have no chance to say oh I get it now.

I think a big loss can feel so gutting because it’s a loss of unconditional love on the earthly plane. You had it, and it’s gone. Some days I wish to be more religious so that I can tell myself that I feel that love somewhere, some days I wish I had more of a knack for signs and symbols and gut intuition, which I think has just been throttled since COVID and my body has been mostly in survival mode.

I miss my mother every day, and some days it stings. It feels very unfair that Porter hasn’t met her. It’s inelegant but grief feels like an old injury that flares up when a storm’s coming or something of that sort. It’s there, you can acknowledge it or not, but it’s not going to gnaw at you until your body is screaming.

It’s funny, I really hated Fleabag’s first season, which sort of painted the picture of Fleabag-the-character as this woman in grief looking for approval through flaunting her sexuality and becoming a monster and it felt trite and neat to me and characters were unbelievably stupid. But season two (Hot Priest season, of course) is perfect, for a variety of reasons. Especially because of Andrew Scott, hubba hubba. (According to my bestie who saw Scott in his one-man Uncle Vanya she has never been in a more thirsty theater lobby.)

Least of all the fact that it got at more realistic feelings over grief. The way that you’re lonely, even if you’re not alone, and the way that all stems from the love that you had, that you feel like you’ve lost. But time, that bitch!, makes it very obvious that the devastation of grief, that feeling of loss can go away, because you had that love, and it shaped you. In fact, it’s your duty to keep that love going through your days, in whatever form or fashion it takes.