Loving My Mother

During meditation this morning I thought about how, when I let myself go into big mind, when I dissolve my edges and become stars, empty space, the song of fish, I can be with my mom again.

When I was younger, maybe 12, I used to fantasize that my mom would leave my father and my brothers and find a place for us, for me and her. I wanted a place with wooden floors, white walls. A place of light and quiet and love.

I wanted to be a couple with my mom because I loved her more than I loved anyone, and yet she wasn’t mine. She was my father’s. She was my brothers’. She was her job’s. She was the refrigerators. The dirty dishes’. She was her friends’. She was our community’s. She was her parents’. Her brothers’. Her sister’s. Her neices’. Her nephews’. Later, her granchildrens’. She was her bill’s. She was her addiction to nicotine's. She was her garden’s. Her knitting’s. Her books’ Her book’s. Her past’s. Her fear of getting fat’s. She was her lover’s. Her dreams’.

No one knows exactly when my mom died. Her brother was in the room with her, sitting in a chair. My father was sleeping downstairs, I think. My brothers were in their homes. I was across the country.

She was there, and then she wasn’t.

My mother said once she loved me most of all, but if that was being loved, getting morsels of a person, then I must have been much smaller than I thought. I was not a whole child, I was a baby mouse, eating seeds of love.

I wanted the whole plant. The tree. The world.

I wanted big love.

But my lover was preoccupied. My lover was butter spread too thin on bread, hating the spread, the loss of self.

What does it mean to love your mother when you are adopted? For some people, this is hell: if they do not love the mother who adopted them, this is a sort of torture chamber, but for me, because I loved my mother, it was something else. It meant I looked at a body I loved more than any other body and wished for in.

I dreamed once I kissed my mother, deeply, the way you would kiss a lover. I woke up and wanted to brush my teeth, bathe in scalding water, get rid of the memory of her mouth that had tasted of old cigarette smoke in my mouth. I was so dirty.

You don’t kiss your mother like that, like she is your lover. You love your mother, but you don’t kiss her like that.

Note to self.

When someone is your mother, when someone is connected to you on a level that is supposedly made of flesh and bone and blood but in your case is made of need and paperwork and money, intimacy can be very complicated.

My daughter and I were merged more deeply than either of us will ever be merged with another until my daughter, if my daughter, has a child of her own.

Of her own. You know what I mean by that, right? I mean that my daughter’s body will create the body of her child, a child of her own.

So what is the child of a mother who adopted him or her?

More than anything I wanted my mother to be a mother of my own.

At my mother’s gravesite, when I tried to read the Mary Oliver poem my mother had asked me to read, I choked on the words. I am choking on them now. By choke I mean so much emotion happens in my body that there is no space for language.

I miss you, Mom. I have missed you forever.

I can’t love you enough. I can’t love you close enough to me. I can’t make you a mother of my own. Maybe I will find you when I meditate. Maybe I will see that the only thing separating us are my thoughts.

I cannot get you close enough.

photo courtesy of Life Magazine