Mama Marina

TW: grief, loss, illness

It’s been seven years since I held your hand and watched you struggle for air for the last time. Over 2,500 days, more than half of which I’ve spent as a mother myself. At times, it’s been a lonely journey—this mothering without a mother—though I’m far from alone. My children have a father who didn’t (and wouldn’t) leave them and grandparents who adore them. They race to the back door as soon as we set them down in NanNan and PapPaw’s yard. I appreciate their presence for the bittersweet gift it is when I read the kids bedtime stories about Grandma and realize I’m the only one picturing you. That Grandma Cici is a collection of pictures on an antique table next to your ashes. That they’ll never run to your back door. And that you will exist in only the stories I tell them.

~

The first time I tried to write about my mother, I was 20 years old in an undergrad creative writing class. I stared at a single, half-filled page of what was supposed to be a 15-page story. I wrote, then erased, in 200-word increments for hours, before finally e-mailing my professor through tears. “I can’t write about my mom.” In her office the next morning, the professor told me to write the story as fiction. “Sometimes,” she explained, “we are too close to the story to see it clearly.”

“… you will exist in only the stories I tell them.”

The story of my mother’s kidnapping was a truth made for fiction.  She was taken hostage in her own car by two convicts who’d escaped from a transport van nearby. My mother, on the other hand, was more myth than fiction. Two days later, I submitted a banal action thriller with a heroine who was as one-dimensional as my understanding of my mother back then. At the story’s climax, my fictional lead fearlessly confronts the men who had nearly orphaned her two children.

The truth, however, was that my mother never confronted them outside the courtroom where she gave measured, straight-forward answers—a show of hardiness that was very on brand for her. For as long as I’d known her, she’d depended on no one and was widely referred to as “strong.” Now a hostage survivor, strength became her defining attribute, while fear became her most constant companion.

After the kidnapping, my mother avoided public places when she could—sat by exits when she couldn’t. By the time I turned 16, she’d taught me more about locking doors, keeping windows up, and checking mirrors than about actual driving, so it was shocking to us both when I passed my driver’s test on the first try. Afterward, she showed me the routes I was allowed to drive and then spent the next week following behind me for safe measure. Some of our worst fights were the nights I left the house and forgot to call when I arrived somewhere.

“Underneath that cloak of stoicism and perseverance was a woman who wanted a life that required neither. A life that just wasn’t so damn hard.”

Telling this story required a vocabulary I hadn’t yet learned—words like trauma, anxiety, and ultra-independence. When I sat down to write the story of her kidnapping, my mother was still the woman I had seen cry only twice. Once, when I was seven and accidentally broke her cheekbone with a golf club. And eight years later, when our house flooded right after she spent the only savings we’d ever had replacing the matted carpet. These two family stories became the foundation upon which my mother’s mythology was built.

Five years after writing the story I would never read again, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. I witnessed her cry again for the first time in my adult life. When the cancer returned two years later, she told me she’d actually spent our childhood crying many tears while she chain-smoked cigarettes behind her bedroom door. The latter was not a mystery. The smell of smoke permeated every surface of the house despite wide-open windows and copious amounts of air freshener. It did, however, mask a secret I would only learn as an adult. Underneath that cloak of stoicism and perseverance was a woman who wanted a life that required neither. A life that just wasn’t so damn hard.

“In many ways, she will always feel like fiction.”

I’ve learned a hard truth since becoming a mother in my now motherless world. In many ways, she will always feel like fiction. I knew my mother as her daughter and then her friend. Then, finally, her caregiver. I never knew her as a fellow mother. We’ve had many painful conversations about my childhood and why I want to raise my children differently; she just hasn’t been present for any of them. I put together the dialogue like I’m working a second-hand puzzle with more gaps than pieces. Then, I step back. Because I have learned that in the absence of more, there is beauty in distance—even when it feels too far.