My mom is dying. I’m sitting at Kitchen Little, a restaurant in Mystic, Connecticut that was one of her favorite places to come for breakfast. She always ordered an omelet with lots of veggies and slurped cup after cup of coffee. We came here together a lot, even when I hated her.

I have just visited her at the nursing home she lives in now, just a mile or two down the road. She looked swollen. She’s immobile, in a wheelchair with not much behind the eyes. I could hear her labored breathing from across the patio and she is holding her purple sippy cup with gripped fingers. Her diagnosis of Primary Progressive Aphasia, a rare form of dementia, has robbed her of her golden years.

The thing about my mother dying is that I wished for it often when she was out of control-when she was in a fit of mental illness and speaking to me as a little child out of her mind or when she was so drunk she didn’t remember calling me eleven times in twenty minutes rambling on about the same bullshit. She guilted me, berated me, was pathetic and broken. I resented her for obvious reasons but also, perhaps more insidiously, because she wasn’t my real mother. I have been losing mothers for most of my life and I will lose them again as time goes on and they age or are ill and die. My mom is months away from death and she is slipping. My birth mom and the time I have left to know her is slipping too-

greasy fingers with moms sliding through, watching them disappear under the water.
It’s not new really, mother loss. I’ve lived with it always. Disney movies tend to kill the moms so the child is faced with such profound adversity they must march through. The audience roots for them because that loss is catastrophic.

I needed her so much when I was a little girl. I remember feeling desperate when she went out for dinner with dad or when she was away. The fear of my mom not returning was etched into my nervous system and would rattle my little body. I wasn’t afraid of a monster under the bed, I was afraid of another mom leaving.

My mom was an amazing teacher. She loved and respected the emotional lives of children more than anyone I’ve ever known. She was called Mrs. Jeanne. She spent her career teach- ing toddlers and preschoolers about colors and shapes and words and how to feel their feel- ings. She sang songs and wore costumes and encouraged her students to be loud and brave, most likely because she couldn’t be when she was a child. She came alive in her caring for those children and in her mothering of my brother and me. I remember thinking, even as a child, how ironic and heartbreaking it was that this woman whose greatest desire was the nur- turing and care of children, couldn’t have any. I imagine there were times when she looked at me and was reminded of that loss. My face belonged to another lineage. She tried to plant me deep into the soil of her life, but I was a sunflower growing in a bed of marigolds. Our relation- ship has always been traced with mutual grief.

As I grew into my teenage years, the shadows of her own unresolved childhood trauma started to seep through the cracks of her wellness and pool like blood at the center of her life. She started drinking, cutting herself, binging and purging and ultimately arrived at a full blown men- tal breakdown. I would come home from school and find her sobbing like a child, unable to catch her breath. She would look at me with eyes that weren’t hers. She would speak to me as someone else, a needy broken woman trapped in mental illness and despair, wanting to show up for me but utterly incapable. She was gone.

My mom had always returned to pay the babysitter, but she ended up leaving me just the same.

I imagine January 21, 1971, the day I was born, was cold in Connecticut as my birth mother labored in the hospital, the hospital selected for her by Catholic Charities. This was the hospi- tal all women giving their babies up for adoption went.

She was 19 and had decided not to be my mom.

Perhaps she held me for a moment, or for an hour, allowing me to smell her and lay wrapped up in her arms or perhaps she didn’t. When the nurses walked me out of the room and out of her life, they took me out of mine too. I was initially given to a foster mother who I know noth- ing about. She was responsible for my care while papers were signed and couples were screened. At the very least she fed me and kept me safe during those very precious first months of my life, only to be taken from her too.

It is difficult to grieve those who are still alive.

I am the mother now. I’m not sure if it is because of or in spite of my experiences, but I am good at it. My children have the best parts of me. I look at them with love and deep gratitude for the roots they have helped me to grow. I see the little version of me who needs the mother- ing too and I hold her close. I will never leave any of them.

Motherhood is utterly vulnerable. It summons the deepest bravery. It shines bright on the cracks and faultiness of our armor and I am here for it, arms open to the rapture and the pum- meling.

No one need grieve me while I am still here.