At 28, I became a motherless mother, and although time has marched on, I find the hole in my heart enlarged with pain that, while shifted, is eternal.
My history with having babies and parents dying is not good.
My mom died five weeks after I gave birth to my first born, Devin, and my dad, seven weeks after my third, Valentina. We can talk about how the good Lord passes the buck, the circle of life, the replacement of one love with another, and that’s OK.
But it’s like telling a bride rain is good luck on her wedding day. Sounds good, but we know the real truth.
What about the chronic pain that lingers in your being with that void? The anger you cannot redirect, the snarls at others who had their mom for their children. A grandmother. How do you stifle that?
The truth is, when you have had a mother-daughter relationship like I did, you are lost. So, on this Mother’s Day, let me talk a little about being a motherless mother, and about my mother. Let me bring her alive on this day.
Her name was Olga. She was a warrior. Breast cancer twice. An impenetrable fortress, well dressed in Geoffrey Beene and tennis skirts, or an apron with a wooden spoon. I got whacked with the same wooden spoon she used to make my dad’s favorite, Amatriciana.
But the forgiveness, the patience and the advocacy were always just behind the whack!, and it was something irreplicable. Whack included.
She would have stood by me if I committed murder. She would have helped me hide the body and gone to the mall after. Then she would have said she killed the sucker herself and gone to jail. For me.
No mate, no best friend, not one human being in my life can replicate the love of a mom who loved like a real mother loved. There is no boundary. No wall. No quicksand that will stop that mom from their child. That was Olga.
The heartbreaker for me is that, out of my eight children, Devin is the only one she ever held. I call him my relic. Her last event was his baptism, and the Lord wanted it that way, creating the blizzard of 1996, when her oncologist said to her, “OK, go ahead, take the snow day; you can come in after the baptism.”
My children only know their Mima from my writings, from pictures in albums, from old clothing I kept just to smell her and stories of her devotion as wife and mom.
These days, more and more of my friends are motherless. But when I lost mine, few could relate. I raised my children without a call to mom about potty-training, diet, toddler behavior, sleepless nights and tantrums. She left me with legacy and a lot of troubleshooting-from-the-hip capability.
So, on Mother’s Day, please have a soft spot for the ones who did it without calling Mom. Without a free babysitter, or trip to the mall, lunch, school pickups or holidays with grandma.
Treat your greatest jewel like you have no homeowner’s insurance on it, because you don’t. When you lose it, it is gone forever, and the memories of wearing it are all you will have.
As we celebrate our amazing gift of motherhood, we mourn to excess what was and what could have been, where our first love began. Because, in the end, she is your first love. Your first playmate, your first confidant, your first cuddle, your first everything.
And we never forget our first.
Perillo, a mother of eight, is the author of “Your Payment Method has Been Declined.”