It came across my Facebook newsfeed four times in one day. Four different friends shared posts that I could not for the life of me relate to. What were the posts about, you ask? Each of them were sharing heartfelt sentiments about their mother no longer being in their lives. True, two of them were simply sharing quotes that someone else had written.
However, one of them was really tugging at my heart strings. I tried very hard to remember a time; just one time that I had shared a wonderful, touching moment with my own mother. Try as I might, I could not think of one time.
Wait! I just remembered of one! Well, it started off good. It was 1983 and my daughter who was almost three was in a hospital in San Antonio, Texas fighting Kawasaki’s Disease. I had been at the hospital for a month or so all alone. She came to visit one day. She had promised to come before and hadn’t, so I didn’t take her seriously this time. I was staying at Fort Sam Houston Army Base in Billeting. The room was scattered with clothes from the night before. She sat in a chair by the window, and I was busy quickly picking things up and putting them away. She called my name, catching me off guard. When I looked at her she was patting her lap. “Come! Leave that stuff. Come sit on my lap,” she said. Okay! I sat gingerly on her lap, and she put her arms around me, pulling me against her breast gently. I was comfortable resting in her arms. She began to hum a song. I listened, trying to see if I could make out the familiar tune. It felt good!
The next day my aunt called from New York to tell me she’d heard that my daughter wasn’t going to make it from my mother. She’d heard that I was living in a crappy motel and my room was a pigsty! I was crushed! So much for warm, fuzzy moments! They’re overrated anyway, I told myself to keep from crying.
So, reading those posts I could have responded negatively, but that’s not my style. Not everyone was blessed with wonderful mothers that loved on them and held them tightly in their arms and encouraged them. Some of us had mothers that didn’t know how to love because something happened in their lives that changed their who entire being; and they were only able to just be. That had to be enough. I didn’t look for it in her, because it wasn’t there. She’s gone now and I will never know from her what it would have been like to have had the kind of mother that my friends had. I don’t wallow in the mire when I think about myself as an orphan. I’ve been blessed with so many fantastic ladies in my life that fulfilled the role of mother, I don’t even feel like an orphan.
