The requisite mother's day post

I’ve already told you this, but my mother killed herself on Mother’s Day 2004. Well, technically it wasn’t on Mother’s Day, but it was that night. This year is the year when the day falls on the same day of the week.

I still haven’t figured out how to enjoy Mother’s Day, and spend most of the preceding week (this week) wondering how to get out of my husband’s family’s Mother’s Day celebration.
He gives me a free pass, but I still feel guilty skipping it.



In many ways I felt I was a casualty of my mom’s long battle with depression. Not only because she left our house when I was 12, but because even into my early twenties…it was always all about her.


In the most dysfunctional way.


In the way that a family member always goes and picks up an alcoholic from the bar—just so they won’t drive home. In the way that I’d do whatever she wanted to do, just so that maybe she would be happy.

The dysfunction manifested itself in the way that I never questioned her about how she could leave me at such an important and fragile age—how she never came to any activity I was involved in and those that were important to me from the time she left until the time she died.


It still hurts—but not so much because she took her own life—in a strange way I understand that part. I understand she was miserable and couldn’t see living one more day in the life she had created for herself. I was miserable for her.


No, it hurts because I will never have the answers I needed from her. About who she was and what she wanted.

But I suspect she didn’t even know those answers.


I loved so many things about my mother. Her voice, her smile, the way she used get ready for work in the morning, and her knack for decorating and giving the perfect gift. I love that in 6th grade she taught me some chemistry, and that so many times she was a soft place to land when I was in pain.


I think of her often, when I am walking into a store and carrying my purse the way she used to, or when I am standing and watching a movie the same way she used to. I think of her when I am playing with my son and trying to freeze the moment in my mind—so I can recall it when I am older and smile.

Sometimes I worry that I don't know how to be a wife and mother...what that role is supposed to look like, and sometimes I put too much pressure on myself and everyone else because I'm trying to make right what I feel went so wrong in my own family life as a child and adolescent.

I am thankful that my choices and the blessings God has given me have brought me to this place. I am thankful that even though fear and doubt and worry may creep in--

I know in the deepest part of my being that I am the luckiest, most blessed wife and mother in the world.

If ever there was reason to celebrate Mother's Day--that would be it.