WHAT IS A MOTHER?January 16, 2024.

What can I say about a mother I really didn’t know? A child who married too young and who gave birth to her own first child, me, at age sixteen? A child who had more children in such a short time afterward. A woman who in separation and divorce with my father, said she did not want to raise a disabled child and said she give me to my dad and she’d keep the house. I’m not making this up. She told me this story to my face.

What can I say about years, month after month, going on my required visits to see her? How can I express how I always felt so different, so out of place, so unable to fit in? How did it feel to walk with her and feel her shaking every time she had to guide me? How did I feel in the midst of the deepest grief over my father’s death, and when she appeared for the service, she told me that she came for one of my brothers, not for me? How am I suppose to know this person, to love this person like a mother, instead of the love I have for the woman who actually did raised me?

Then there was the mother who raised me from age six to fourteen. The one who took me to all those rheumatology appointments, told off the boys who made fun of me, was there every afternoon when I came home from school, held me when I cried, comforted me when I had nightmares, fed me chocolate pudding when I was sick, listened as I got my first crushes, as I went on and on and on about this or that boy, who wept with me when the time came that Dad decided to leave her, and I had to go away, because she wasn’t a biological parent, and in this case, a judge wouldn’t give custody to a stepparent. She is the mother of my heart. She is and always will be the one who means “mother” to me.

Yet, this once child, the biological mother I never knew had some qualities I greatly admired. She was a hell of a cook, and I wish I had her biscuits and gravy right now. she was a hard hard worker. She always won when she went to Reno to gamble. She was incredible with money, never blowing everything she had in an instant. I am a good cook too. I was a hard worker when retired. I always lose when I gamble, so I never do it. I am not amazing with money and don’t save it worth a damn.

What am I supposed to feel when I get a call saying this once child bride and mother, the biological mother,  has died? Age 82 with terrible dementia? I thought I’d feel guilty because I haven’t seen her since  Dad’s memorial service, nearly 27 years ago? But I don’t feel guilty. Aren’t I supposed to feel a loss? But I don’t feel that loss. I feel sad for the rest of her family, but I don’t have that grief that many might say I I should feel, as if it is an instinct to love a biological person, simply because they are biological? I feel nothing, one way or the other, and I’m writing about it, because it feels weird to feel nothing at all. It’s more like the sorrow I might experience hearing that anyone I hardly knew had died.

Does this say something unpleasant about me? I had intense, deep grief for many years following my dad’s death. Was I so traumatized for so many years after my dad’s death, that I trained myself to feel nothing at any future losses? Or is it just a matter of life. Life apart, life not communicating, life going along, day after day, until all that time is gone, and it’s too late to feel anything? I don’t know. But I wanted to write this to clear my head and move on. I have enough to worry about right now.

Farewell, Marsha. Be at peace now. Your work is done; your new adventure begins. We were so different, worlds apart in attitudes and dreams. Maybe, if we’d both worked at it, there might have been something for us at the end. Something besides this feeling of quiet sadness, that I can’t even find sorrow at your death. I feel sorry for those you left behind, for the husband and children that came after my little girl years. If I feel sadness, it’s for that child, the one who didn’t get to o to proms, graduate high school, spread her wings and fly to wherever those dreams she must have had would take her.

Be at peace little girl. Your labor of life is complete.