When it's not a Happy Mother's Day: the psychology of motherlessness

I never thought I’d want to get married until I lost my mother.  Be patient, readers, because I’m taking the long way around on this one.

My Mom was Better Than Your Mom

As the saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone, but I definitely knew what I had with my mother.  Her name was Dorothy and she was pretty amazing.  I’m not saying that just because we shared a body and genetic material, since other non-biological connections agreed with me on her overall coolness.  If I had an electronic photo of her I’d post it, but she died in 1994 – before digital photography, Flickr and Facebook – so you’ll have to settle for a few less than 1,000 words instead of a picture:  Mommy was 5’8″, willowy, and looked like a cross between Diahann Carroll and Michelle Obama.  Apparently when my Dad saw her, he forgot all about the other woman he was supposed to meet and asked for the digits.  #TrueStory.  Not only was she beautiful, but she was really generous and funny with a little bit of an edge.  That personality, and my smile, are what I inherited from her; I got my father’s nose and – thankfully – his feet.  “Dot” was a gossip (my cousins used to call her “Rona Barrett”; you young folks might want to Google that), a mean cook, and the smallest bit naughty, like when she announced “you have to have sex before you get married to make sure you like what he can do.”  Okay, she didn’t know my 13-year-old self was in the room at the time, but I’m gonna have to agree with her on that bit of advice!  Nobody could fry a chicken like my mother, and I’d kill right about now for one of her over-beaten, slightly-overcooked chocolate cakes.  Baking was not her strong suit, but she had many, many others for which to compensate for that one culinary shortcoming.

The other best part about my mom is that she was MY MOM.  And I’m an only child, so I selfishly didn’t have to share her with brother- and sister-types.  The thing about mothers, though, is that even when you have to share them with other people you still only get one, and the singularity of that relationship defines you in ways you may never really know.  Mommy may have been sister, friend, neighbor to some, and I have tons of cousins, classmates and business associates, but I’ll only ever have one mother.  Sure, I live with my aunt now, and all she’s like a mother to me but not my mother.  For example:  if I leave clothes, dishes around the apartment, my aunt tells me off; when her daughter does it, the lecture comes with clean dishes and a load of laundry.  Not that I expect anyone to pick up after my grown ass, but I just miss having someone who would do it, with or without lip service. (Actually, Dorothy Mae would give much lip; its hereditary.)   I think about that sometimes and remember Mommy‘s words to me after her own mother died;  I’ll never forget riding in the car with Mommy and noticing that she’d been crying.  When I asked her why she was so sad, she said “I miss my mother.”  It didn’t seem possible to my 8-year-old brain that my own mother actually needed mothering.  After all, she was in her 40′s with a husband and a daughter; she was all grown up and had lived for a few years since my Granny’s passing, so what was with the tears?  Of course, as I sit here crying over the loss of my Mom over 16 years ago, I totally understand that you can never replace a mother.

This Mom For Hire:  A Great Service for Motherless Daughters

Think, if you will, of the most important moments of your life, and how they warrant a mother.  My friend Sarah lost her mother a year prior to getting engaged, and had to deal with snotty wedding gown saleswomen who didn’t think she could buy a dress without her mother present.  “Don’t you want to bring your mother in to see you in the dress?”, they’d ask.  “Uh, no, my mom is…well, she can’t….she died,” was probably close to what Sarah said to the folks at Kleinfeld before she returned to the fitting room and had a good cry.  I imagine myself doing the very same thing should I ever find myself trying on frothy bridal creations, though I’ll likely be bawling the entire time.  Also, daughters need a mother at the annual gyno visit when they don’t know when Mom started menstruating, or stopped, or how the whole process was.  I don’t know when she lost her virginity (presumably before marriage, but I prefer not to think about that) or any sexual/reproductive history other than the fact that I was born and I’m biological because I look like both my parents.  All the details I’d need about that part of Mommy‘s life are things that a husband or a sister wouldn’t necessarily know or even remember, so I have nobody to fill in those blanks.   True, adopted children don’t have them either, but they know from jump that it’s gonna be that way; someone pulled the mother rug out from under me when I was 22 – old enough to know that I’d need her, but still too young to really comprehend just how much.

Can you replace a Mother with a Husband?  Maybe…

On her deathbed (which I didn’t know was such, but she probably did), Mommy gave me a few sage pieces of advice.  The last words she ever said to me were, “Be good.”  I don’t know what she meant by that, but I’m trying anyway.  And the other advice she gave me was to find a man like my Dad.  Her exact words were, “If you’re lucky enough to marry a man like your father, you’ll be very happy.”  At the time, I laughed and said “I’m too young to get married.”  Then she died and my Dad pretty much gave me the exact same advice, using words like “soulmate” and “I’ll never remarry.”  Over time, I’ve given some thought to the other, singular relationship you have in a spouse.  Yeah, people get divorced and cheat and the like, but not my folks.  Witnessing my father’s grief, I also saw that his loss was as unique, as inconsolable as mine:  husband and wife is not a replicable bond, at least when you do it right.  And even if you do it wrong, or multiple times, nobody is that spouse at that time, and nobody means the same thing to you as someone with whom you’ve chosen to live until death (or you realize what a horrible mistake you’ve made, give or take a few years).

For years, I’ve held onto the belief that finding a soulmate would somehow fill the void left in my life – and my heart – by my mother’s death.  Not that I’m looking for a man to take care of me like a mother, but more so I’m looking for that singular, unique relationship.  I believe that in the same way that you only get one mother, you only get one “spouse-as-soulmate“; the purely selfish relationship in which the two people in it can’t get from anyone else what they get from each other.  Clearly I don’t know what it is that these soulmates are getting from each other because I haven’t found mine yet.  Or maybe I’m wrong in believing that my man should be as irreplaceable as my mom, that both warrant an unapproachable place in my life, my heart, my world.  Still, I yearn for someone in my life that loves me more, in a different way, than they love everybody else, and vice versa.

My Mother’s Day Advice

Fortunately, I have no regrets in my relationship with my mom.  I told her I loved her, and I treated her that way even when she annoyed me.  I sat by her bedside for months when she was sick, because there was nowhere else I would have been.  And, for the most part, I think I’ve made her proud.  She didn’t regret the sacrifices she made for me, and told me as much, which is what I think a mother is supposed to do.  I do wish that she’d gotten to live more of her life taking care of herself the way she took care of me and of everyone else.  I also wish that I got to know her more as an adult, as a friend, as a woman, than the Uber-Madre as I sometimes see her.  Sometimes I think that I’m a bad daughter because I don’t go out to the cemetery to put flowers on her grave, or that I don’t really know where said grave is.  Then I remember that she always said “give me my flowers while I’m living,” so I write about her instead.  So, Dorothy Mae, if you’re sitting up in Heaven, drinking a cup of coffee, trying to bum a cigarette from St. Peter without getting caught, know that I’m always thinking of you.

Happy Mother’s Day.