Missing

A couple months ago, I was listening to the radio when “Sweet Caroline” started playing. It was surreal for me to experience my eyes welling up with tears before my brain even understood why. I’m not some wacky Neil Diamond fan (not that there’s anything wrong with wacky Neil Diamond fans!), you must understand. Neil Diamond just makes me think of my mom, and every once in a while it hits me, this unexpected missing.

It happened again just a week or two ago. I was mailing some packages, using the “c/o” (“care of”) abbreviation, and I suddenly vividly recalled when I’d first read that abbreviation. It was during the summer I spent with my relatives in Arizona when I was about twelve. Mom wrote to me religiously, sending not just snail mail but also photos and stickers, probably every week, “c/o the Neils.” I think I still have those letters, buried up in the attic amid a sea of other mementos I haven’t glanced at for ages. I don’t remember what I thought of those letters then, but now I’m glad to know I have them, some reminder of her.

These memories, this missing—they’re not just a missing of who she was. I miss who she wasn’t. Is that strange, to miss what never was? Like missing having brown eyes when all your life they’ve been green. Like missing all the other things you aren’t: a firefighter, a ballerina, a toxicologist (hey, a girl can have her dreams!).

I remember sitting at a midwife appointment, pregnant with my second child, reviewing family history. “It says here your mom died of breast cancer. When was that?”

I paused to think. “April 2005. Actually, almost exactly five years ago today.” It was odd to think that I hadn’t remembered the date as it passed just a few days earlier. A breath of guilt swept over me; wasn’t I supposed to remember these things?

My midwife gave me a sympathetic glance. “That’s so hard,” she said, “especially when you’re pregnant.”

Was it? I couldn’t help thinking that probably it was supposed to be. Probably I was supposed to miss the baby booties Mom would never buy for my children, the excessive pampering she would smother all over me when the baby was born. I was supposed to miss these things the way I was supposed to miss her as I’d planned my wedding, only four months after she died. I was supposed to long for endless discussions of color coordination and appetizers and china patterns and which wedding dress would minimize my bustline (as if that were even possible).

And in a way, I guess I do. But I miss them because I can’t imagine them. I would never have asked my mother’s opinion on the flower arrangements for the wedding. That just wasn’t the relationship we had. I would absolutely have barred her from the waiting room while I was in labor. I can’t imagine her at my home cooking me meals and holding the newborn so I could shower or take a nap. She was not that type of mother.

She was frustrating, tiring, upsetting, depressing. She made feel feral sometimes, a wild beast whose greatest instinct was to hide under the bed and hibernate. But she was also beautiful, generous, supportive, a dreamer, an artist, a creator. She practiced with me interminably for a spelling bee I wanted to win and she believed in me the whole time. She made me feel like I could have wings and fly. Sometimes, anyway. She was all of these things and others as well. I think, like me, she probably wished that she was more than she was. She probably missed the parts of herself that she wasn’t.

I wanted to add a picture of her to this blog post, but I realized that all my pictures of Mom are buried up in the attic as well, along with those letters and the accumulated detritus of my packrat existence. I want to go up there and find something, to bring it down to remind us all of her. I want my daughters to know her. She wasn’t perfect, but I think I believe she did her best. Some of who she was—both the good and the bad, I’m sorry to say—she handed down to me.

And so I miss her, from time to time, in these weird moments. While painting wooden shapes with my children, using the acrylics paints I inherited from her that still (amazingly!) have not dried up after all these years. When I see the inscription on the front cover of the Bible I’m still using, the one she gave me for my birthday in 1992. When I look at the date and remember that her birthday is coming up. She would be 70 today. It’s just a little pang here and there—not too often, not too overwhelming, just a reminder of what is gone for now.

I hope she looks down at me in moments like this and understands the confusion, the muddle of feelings I have for her. I hope she forgives me for the times I am angry at her or frustrated or longing for what she never was. I hope she forgives me, just as I am still forgiving her.