Honoring my mother...

A miraculous badass...

Today I listened to a We can Do Hard Things Podcast, where Oprah was the guest star and read the letter that Glennon wrote to her after her own mother had passed away.

I thought about it in the context of my own mother and her own strained relationship with my maternal grandmother.

My mother’s mother abandoned her four children on my mother’s 13th birthday. She was consequently tossed from relatives who didn’t want her or to foster families.

My grandmother was an odd person. I would never say she was warm, not like my paternal grandmother. Still, growing up, I knew her. She visited.

Observing the relationship between her and her kids was always odd and yet, she was around and a part of their lives, however strained the relationship may have been.

In so many ways, and by many measures, my mother didn’t live an extraordinary life. She will not be remembered in books or titles or fame.

However, she made key differences to students she touched, through her teaching. Even now, I rarely go back to visit where someone doesn’t have some story about Mrs. D. and the impact that she had on them.

I used to think that my mother’s greatest accomplishment were my brother and I, her kids. And while I do think we were greatest joy, her children, I think that to chalk up her whole purpose in life to us is to discredit her own strength and resiliency and to—once again—center another over herself. My mother did this a lot throughout her life, with my father, then with my brother and I. I don’t blame her. She clearly had co-dependency and lack of self worth taught to her.

To me, my mother’s greatest accomplishment was that—apparently like Oprah—she had a really shitty mother. And yet, my mother was such an iconic, quintessential mother. She always made us feel so loved. So unconditionally loved. She was rather tentative and uncertain to do things for herself, often times she seemed unable to do them for herself. And yet, as much as she could and with very, very limited financial resources and emotional support, she moved mountains for me and provided me with a better start to life and path than she ever had had.

I know she felt that she did not do enough.

But now, as an adult, and tending to my own wounded inner child, I imagine my mother’s.

I can not even begin to conceive of what her childhood was like.

All that my mother became, this amazing beacon of maternal love, she did it on her own. She did in spite of my grandmother and her lack of maternal support and love, and absence from her life.

I don’t have children, but if I ever had any, I often think I could never measure up to my mother. If I do, I would constantly be using the love and support that she showered onto me.

But to be so altruistic and so caring and warm loving with no example of it—from a father who was not in the picture, a mother who abandoned you, and an abusive step-father. She taught herself how to love others, even though I am not sure she ever learned to love herself.

Though she was heavily traumatized and majorly depressed throughout my life, I always knew it was not my fault. And that she still loved me.

And she still loved and gave very deeply, even through those dark periods. She still encased me with the support that I needed and ought to have gotten from two parents.

That’s seriously bad ass.

Therefore, I think about my mother and her relationship to my grandmother, in this Glennon Doyle letter:

“I would never presume to guess what your relationship was like, how complex it was and is to be your mother’s daughter… what your feelings have been or will be. I just wanted to say, that you are my example of how to gather up mothering love and use it as a floodlight to illuminate and warm the world. You are my…best example of grace, which means that we can somehow give what we’ve never even received. I don’t know much, but from everything you bravely say and kindly don’t say, I’ve gathered that you didn’t get the mothering love you deserved and needed as a little girl and a grown girl.

To me, that is what makes you a miracle. It is a miracle that somehow you took the broken pieces that she put in your hands, all of them and you spun them into gold and opened your hands wide and offered that gold back to the world. Which is not just a gift to the world, it is a gift directly back to your mother, because you worked with what she gave you, ensured that her legacy through you is gold. With your help, your mother’s legacy is gold. What a gift. If there is a Heaven, she can see that now. She can see that her miraculous daughter somehow, somehow turned her offerings to gold. God, bet she’s amazed and grateful. Well done, good faithful, miraculous, badass, servant.”

My mother doesn’t have the fame and wealth and accolades of Oprah Winfrey, certainly, though her mothering (lack of) example mirrors hers.

But she’s a miraculous badass servant too.

And I miss her terribly.