Where You Lead

This morning, which is Mother’s Day, my dad emailed me a photo of his fireplace mantle. The mantle is a mourning spot for various photos and urns of dead relatives, friends and dogs. For the last year and a half, my mother’s ashes have been in a box in a reusable bag emblazoned with the funeral home’s logo. On her birthday, and death day, my dad bought bouquets of yellow roses, placed them next to the bag and sent me a photo. There’s a dark humor that runs through my family, it was kind of the glue that was our weird familial language, I guess. It seemed equally tragic and comic that my mother, who so carefully tended to the mantle over the years, would find herself in reusable bag limbo. We used to joke that the dogs had better urns than the people, and it wasn’t a lie.

This week, the wooden urn he picked out came and he sent me an email apologizing for sending me the photo on Mother’s Day. I was already crying, thinking of how much I missed my mom. The truth is, I’ve missed her true presence in my life before she died, missed her true self that was masked by drinking and anxiety the last 10 years (at least).

The other night, I dreamt she and I were sitting next to each other, both wearing headphones. I was listening to an interview with Daryl and the host asked him how he liked to relax and he answered, “Hanging out with my wife, Shannon.” I started sobbing, the kind of grief that would overtake me right after he died. I was doubled-over, gasping for breath, full body crying. In the dream, I wanted my mom to notice, to put her arm around me and comfort me. Instead, she kept her headphones on looking straight ahead. Eventually, she turned toward me and noticed I was upset. This is the second dream I’ve had in which I am with her, consumed by sorrow, and she is unaware.

Today at my workout studio, we were listening to a Mother’s Day playlist, and one of the songs was Carole King’s “Where You Lead.” While the original song was recorded in the 1970s, most now know it as the theme to The Gilmore Girls. The original lyrics were tweaked by King and her own daughter to fit the show’s mother-daughter female bond plot and replaced some of the original lyrics which were about following a man.

Suddenly, the lines I’d heard a million times before and found comforting hit me funny. It felt stifling to think that anywhere you lead, this “I’ is going to follow, be there, etc.

“(you) never know how it's all gonna turn out, but that's okay / Just as long as we're together, we can find a way"

I realized how much of my life I spent thinking my mom and I had that relationship. That I was out in the world, blazing a trail and she would eventually follow. I always thought she would move to Richmond, followed by my dad, but it never happened. She entertained the idea early on, even met with a realtor, but, in the end, dropped the idea. She had an odd hang-up about “Not being one of those people who follows their children everywhere.” I wonder if it was because the people my parents bought their house from were an example of exactly that fate: They built the house with retirement in mind and to be closer to their son, only to sell it a few years later when he moved to another state for a job and they followed.

I know there were other fears at play, too, she had lived in the same city her entire life, moving to another city and another state was no small thing. And yet, until she died, I had this dream of her coming down here, being a new environment, getting healthy, facing her alcoholism, getting the help she needed.

Mother’s Day is an absolute gut punch for any of us grieving mothers or motherhood in any form.

It is a day whose drumbeat starts at least two weeks before , frantic reservations for brunch, advertisements for gifts, reminders from any service you have ever used that “Mother’s Day is Coming!” With other holidays (with the exception of birthdays) you can kind of skirt the grief, but this one goes right for the jugular—all about mom’s, all day, non-stop.

I’m glad other people have healthy relationships with their moms. I’m glad they have moms who help them with their children and love on them and sacrifice and pass down recipes and do all the things that fit neatly into our mold of sacrifice and unending loyalty. That was not my mom. She definitely sacrificed and fought for me and loved me with tenacity, but her life did not end when mine began. I was unplanned. She had a career she liked. Ours was a two-income household, so her staying at home with me wasn’t an option. My grandparents were retired and lived nearby, so I spent my time after school with them and I was totally happy with that arrangement. I loved that she worked and enjoyed going with her to the newsroom, or, later, working in the sales office. It gave me a glimpse into her world and the identity she had that had nothing to do with me.

I’m only now beginning to understand and follow her long and tangled tail of trauma and addiction, the patterns I chalked up to her personality come from something much bigger.

Maybe I was the one with the noise canceling headphones on, looking the other way. In many ways she left me long before she died, and coming to terms with that is going to take the rest of my life to understand.