A Mother's Aching Heart

My soul aches on this day, the day set aside to honor and remember mothers.

I have fond recollections of honoring my mom on Mother’s Day, both from the time I was small, as well as into adulthood. I remember making or choosing things that I hoped she would love and would be a keepsake for her. I too recall receiving things from my own daughters that they had made or chosen to celebrate me on that special day. For about 35 years I was given love and attention, as if I was actually a mother worthy of it. Mike used to go so overboard, and wear himself out, that we finally agreed on simple gifts and take-out food, just to conserve energy and clean-up time.

These past few years have been brutal. I anticipate Mother’s Day nearly as dreadfully as I would anticipate a surgery. That is the only thing that I can think of that is more horrid to me. How one can be loved, honored, celebrated, doted on, and then be both privately and publicly shunned, with a refusal to join together for professional help, as if the years of a mother’s love, sacrifice, cheering, believing, helping, and putting her own aspirations on hold, are of no value anymore? One's mind and heart simply do not know what to do with that.

There are times that I just need my mom.

Back in 1991, my “simple” surgery healing took a wrong turn. I was taken to the ER, where they determined there was “nothing wrong” with me and sent me away. I arrived back home at about 1 a.m., and because I didn’t know what to do or how I could live one more minute with the most excruciating pain I’ve ever known, I called Mom. She arrived, came to my bed sporting her colorful and soft shirt, and her trademark scent of Victoria’s Secret Strawberry Champagne lotion, and she wrapped me in her arms as she cried with me. She too didn’t know what could be done, but she joined me in my absolute misery and let me know I was loved.

That “there’s nothing wrong” pain turned into a three week hospital stay filled with morphine, no food, an NG tube, CT and ultrasound scans, diarrhea, a grapefruit-sized abscess, a wide and winding incision with staples, antibiotics that made me vomit and nearly split my incision, a colostomy and mucous fistula, an allergy to morphine that resulted in me watching horses gallop past my third story window, and an all-out battle to stay on this side of the veil. My doctor remarked that he nearly lost me and that I was "too damn skinny." Through it all, Mom was there. Although there was an empty bed in the room, no one was allowed to sleep on it, so she commandeered a cardiac chair, brought blankets and her pillow, and slept near my side because it was dangerous and frightening when I couldn’t always get the help I needed during the night. When I told her that I didn’t know if I was going to make it, she cried and told me I would. I had two young children that we both thought needed their mom. (That is now debatable!)

Over these years, my family has loved to gather, to celebrate and honor one another for birthdays or other holidays, or truthfully, just for the heck of it. We enjoyed one another’s company and, at least in my estimation, we were part of a web of interconnected humans that would go to battle for one another. We prayed and we played. We showed up when there was a crisis and all helped in the ways we could. We loved hard.

How then can something so beautiful turn into something so sour that the unity is gone? For nearly three years now, there have been no all-family gatherings. Faith and devotion have changed in ways I never saw coming. There are those that choose not to wish me a Happy Mother’s Day, or happy any-other-day. The contrast is glaring. The reality is excruciating. The sadness is palpable.

Mom, I really need a hug.

I am left with my faith in a loving Father, who understands my broken heart, who hears my wails in the night, my pleas for help, and who sends me kind and loving friends and family to keep me going when I’m uncertain that I can. He reassures me that all is not lost, even if it appears that it is. He knows my mother-heart, the heart that would cause me to run in front of a freight train to save my children, the heart that fought so very hard through two life-threatening illnesses because she did not want to leave her children motherless, the heart that has never before known so much agony and pain. He understands and He freely offers His healing balm.

He tells me that I am His and He has the biggest and best family of them all.