Mom has been gone for twenty years and I still feel her absence so deeply, still think of her almost every day, trying to remember her voice, seeing her in my reflection in the mirror more and more, the lines parenthesizing my lips and my turkey wattle neck, the need to stuff my cankles into ankle socks with sneakers and confide in grocery store clerks.
It’s complicated though because she wasn’t very kind to me for the first quarter century of my life. She was a fundamentalist pastor’s wife and godliness and obedience were of utmost importance in our household. Her hand and her touch brought pain much more often than tenderness. Then a fluke brain aneurysm wiped away her meanness and cleared her memory banks. We were gifted a little over a decade with a mother whose emotions ran close to the surface, who cried easily and laughed and smiled a lot and forgot she’d ever been cruel.
I wish sometimes we’d had more time with the good Mom, had longer to laugh and cry together and settle into a relationship that felt easier and more normal.
But we didn’t.
Life is cruel too, and I laugh and cry now with my sisters, or sometimes just alone.
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