If I Could See My Mom One More Time I Would Ask Her These Questions
My friend Christina Enneking has a podcast called REAL Eyes Realize, and she interviewed me the other day. At the end, she asked a few questions that were meant to be answered quickly, on the fly. She asked who I would most like to have lunch with, and, much to my surprise, I said my mom.
And then I started to cry.
Luckily I’ve become skilled at crying and acting like nothing is wrong, and so we finished off the interview and then I said goodbye and took my dog for a walk so I could think.
Not Toni Morrison? Not Jesus? Not David Chang? Not my birth mother whom I never got to meet when I was a cognizant human?
My mom?
Writing that gives me goosebumps. Mom. What if I could bring her back to life and see her? Now? Now that I am finally myself?
I first met my mom, I think, when I was ten weeks old. Maybe my parents met me before then, but I don’t remember hearing of them checking me out before they went to pick me up. (Isn’t that funny?! I don’t even know for sure when my mom first saw me!) My mom is dead now and I can’t ask her, and my father is old, and I don’t want to ask questions and hear that he doesn’t remember. Or maybe I don’t want to hear the answers. It’s like when you fall and cut your knee and part of you doesn’t want to look at the damage.
Sometimes it feels easier just to live with the pain instead of looking at what hurts.
I wrote You Don’t Look Adopted after my mom died. My mom doesn’t know me as a person who stared her relinquishment/adoption trauma in the face and named the experience.
I have said that I thought if I wrote about adoption when my mom was alive it would have killed her.
What exactly would have killed her?
Me defining myself as a person who was not born of her flesh, as a person who had not one mother, but two.
This would be a form of death as our relationship was based on the understanding that my mother was my mother and that there was only one mother in the house. I was not allowed to have two mothers. How did I know this? Because any time I mentioned my birth mother, my mother burst into tears or got quiet or walked out of the room. And maybe this only happened once, and now in my mind the one time I mentioned my mother to my mother, my mother burst into tears and I learned the rule.
No mother talk to the mother.
Part of coming out of the fog for adopted people, I think, involves becoming an adult. We are no longer the baby secretly hoping if we do the right thing the first mother will come back and rescue us and bring us back to the secret life we carry inside, like a fist that won’t open.
Now I am an adult, and I would like to meet my mother in the incarnation of myself. I would like to talk to my mother as an adult and ask her questions. I would like to get to know my mother.
Lunch with my mother. First of all, I would have her politely strapped into her seat so she couldn’t stand up and walk away. Secondly, we would eat delicious food, something she could delight over, swoon over the fresh berries in a salad, perhaps.
Question 1
Who are you?
Question 2
Who do you think I am?
Question 3
What dreams did you have for yourself? (Remember, she’s dead. But for the lunch she’s lively and not at all corpse-like.)
Question 4
What dreams did you have for me?
Question 5
How did I delight you?
Conversation Wrap-Up
Mom, these are the ways you delighted me…
If I knew my mother, I would, I think, have a better sense of how I became the person I am. I would have a deeper understanding of how her dreams for herself and for me had helped to form me. I would perhaps have a clearer understanding of what is mine and what is not mine.
I would get to know the person I have loved the longest of any person on the planet. Maybe, this time, she would let herself be all herself in front of me. Maybe this time she would not try to present as the person she thought she was supposed to be and let me in, all the way.
Finally, I would get to flat-out love my mom. I would get to face her as a human being, not as someone I was afraid was trying to own me or control me or change me. I would get to speak to her from the center of my heart, a place I had long guarded from sight. I would get to say the many, many things I adored about her, and I could do it in the safety and terrible grief of knowing that soon she would disappear and I would never see her again.
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