MY MOM

For years, I looked at my mother through one lens—what wasn’t there, what felt missing.

My mother didn’t explain herself much. At least not in ways I remember now. There were no long emotional talks at the kitchen table. No detailed stories about what she feared, regretted, longed for, or carried.

As a kid, I think I was always looking for evidence that love was present in our house, though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing at the time.

As children, we begin forming our understanding of love, worth, tenderness, and care through the experience of our parents.

I was trying to understand all of those things through my young and unskilled understanding of my mother.

She was the emotional atmosphere of my life.

Looking back now, I can see that I spent years reading weather patterns. Looking for signs. Trying to understand love through emotional currents instead of words or reassurance.

But aging has a way of widening the frame.

My mother was carrying far more than I was able to see as a child. Or as a young adult. Or hell, until recently.

So this is not a story about suddenly discovering my mother was secretly perfect.

It’s about perspective. My perspective.

It’s about realizing that my mother, like all of us, was a complicated ecosystem of history, disappointment, longing, fear, limitation, love, desire, and restraint.

From left to right: mom, Chi, Lol, me and Charlie Brown.

What I once experienced in my mother as distance may also have been survival. Or simply the limits of what she herself knew how to express. Being a single parent of four is no joke.

I am now approaching seventy, and I have reached an age where I am older than my mother was during many of the years I judged her most harshly. That changes the frame for me.

I can finally see that something essential was missing for me, yes. And also, something essential was forged.

For much of my adult life, the predominant feeling I carried about my mother was grief. Grief for a closeness that rarely existed between us in the ways I longed for it to.

And yet, when I understood she was probably nearing the end of her life, I got on a plane to Bermuda.

Some part of me knew I needed to go.

In just a few days, my mother had been moved from her independent apartment at Westmeath to a full-care ward.

I spent those days sitting beside her, though there wasn’t much between us to say. There had never really been. I decided it was enough simply to be there.

Late one afternoon, after hours of sitting silently beside her bed, she reached up and touched my cheek with her hand. So lightly. Then she looked directly into my eyes.

No words were exchanged.

But something moved through me in that moment so quickly, and completely, it felt almost physical.

I realized her touch on my skin felt utterly unfamiliar.

At the same time, something in me began to soften. Years of emotional armor I had carried seemed to loosen their grip all at once.

Because somehow, with that one touch, I understood something I had wanted to know my entire life: I mattered to her.

It lasted only a moment.

But it seemed to recognize something I had been carrying for as long as I could remember: the longing itself. I did not realize how much of my life had been shaped by my belief that deep tenderness belonged to other people.

Until my mother touched my cheek.

A little while later, I left to get some air. That was when my mother passed.

Looking back now, I think some part of me understood exactly why I needed to go to Bermuda.

Had I not gone, I would have missed the single most healing moment my mother and I ever shared.

Perspective has widened my frame.

For much of my life, I saw my mother through the eyes of the child I had been.

Now, finally, I can hold both what was missing and what was forged.

I can see that much of my life was built using survival skills I inherited from my mother. Capability, stamina, endurance, the ability to carry on.

Those are not small things. They helped me build a life of my own.

But survival and feeling deeply nourished are not the same thing.

And adulthood, awareness, and a deeper understanding of life have given me something else:

choice.

My mother shaped the first version of me.

But now, finally, I understand: I have authorship over the rest.

My wedding day

From my table to yours,

Mary