Remembering Mom at 80

Today mom would’ve turned 80 years old. It could’ve been a pretty epic Mother’s Day celebration. Instead, this summer, we’ll mark 15 years without her. I’m still not as old as she was when she became a mother, my mother. Later this year, I’ll turn 40 and we could have celebrated my being half her age, finally. When I was a kid, I used to tell her “someday I’ll be 40 and you’ll be 80.” I really had no idea what those meant besides numbers.

After so many years, missing her ranges from something raw to something similarly conceptual because I simply have no idea what it would be like to be 25 or 30 or 40 and have a mother. It’s mostly the small things, or the big things that are made of small things that I wish I could with her. A fun fact I learned. A question I have about her life now that I’m older and want to reinterpret a story. A parallel between us that I’ve observed. A moment when I could tell her that she was a good mother and I feel so lucky to have had her for as long as I did.

She lived with curiosity. She accepted that she was strange and leaned into what gave her joy. She befriended others, even when it was challenging to find points of connection. She lived with a sense of adventure (although sometimes she was very tired, whether from having two small bundles of energy all day or later from cancer). She wanted to travel and meet people and also to host the same friend for tea each week and go on a walk with a neighbor nearly every morning. She’d light up for even the smallest joy, whether a baby’s smile or a piece of holographic wrapping paper catching the sun. I always knew that when she told me something, she actually believed it.

We had arguments and fights and ongoing disagreements. I once threw a textbook at her and she told me she hoped I had a child just like me …and then apologized for cursing me. Most of what I carry forward are the good things, but those memories remind me in my most struggling, human moments that friction doesn’t preclude deep love we had for each other. That it won’t be the main story or the primary memory of you when there is so much more and better to your life. (Although her apology was just so extremely her that it stayed with me.)

It was an extraordinary gift to know her and have her as my mother.

I have written before about my mother’s death (content note: this is very much about death itself), remembering her at the one-year mark, and a reflection on her, the lives and mortality of my grandmothers, and uncertainty when I reached half the age she was when she died.