My mom died 24 years ago. And I amazed how my relationship with her continues to grow and change. After she committed suicide I distanced myself from her in my heart. She was not a memory but a source of living pain. How she could have let her schizophrenia and addiction get so out of control I could not understand. I wanted to understand and tried to understand. I just could not. I was too young to understand that it was not her fault. Afterall, I thought she was the strongest woman in the world. How could she let this happen?

She had been in and out of mental institutions and recovery centers for months while I was passed around in foster homes. Her need for help and my need for help were a source of embarrassment for me. I used make jokes to anyone who knew where she was about coo-coo farms and loony bins. But mostly I said nothing at all. When she died I said even less. The embarrassment instantly subsided and the pain took over. For years. I was hard as cement. My only passing thoughts of my mom were those that were triggered by bad memories. Memories of beatings and torture. Her deeply sadistic ways of controlling me as a child. Fortunately, with each year I get softer. 

She was 39 when she died. I am 37 now. Part of me wonders what a woman is supposed to look like or do after 39? I'm not entirely sure. I've only got two years to figure it out. By my age my mother had four children. She had been married four times. She had spent her years juggling all of that and her illness and addiction. Damn.

I have been blessed to have my husband's mother in my life for the last eight years. I often look to her as an example of how life goes on and how one might engage in living past 39. She is a successful conceptual artist. One day a few years ago the two of us were roaming around in a high-end furniture shop in SOHO. And memories of my mom washed over me life a ten foot wave of water. I stood in front of a piece of furniture. Something hand stitched by an artist with a price tag in the thousands of dollars. I thought back to the furniture my mother used to make. She was a self-taught upholsterer. Eventually she got to the point where she was building the frames and all by hand. I would watch her buy raw materials like wood, foam, fabric, thread and see her craft a couch. I would think it was magic if I did not see it with my own eyes. I looked at the hunk of expensive junk in front of me and realized my mother could do anything I saw in that store and do it better. She never had a chance. She was a highly creative artist. She was incredible. 

When my husband's mom gave me her old sewing machine a few years ago I was really curious to learn how to use it. The funny thing was - I sat down in front of it, threaded the needle and just started sewing. I guess I had spent so many years with my mom as she used her industrial sewing machine that I already knew how to sew. It was simply in me. Like a gift from my mom.

Just yesterday I was at the bookshop in Boston's South Station and picked up a copy of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Sylvia also committed suicide. And she was a poet. My mom was a poet too. Sylvia's book had me thinking about all the poems my mother wrote. She loved to craft words. I think back and I never saw her writing. I never saw her creative process. In any of her creative works. But yet she repeated a few of her poems so many times that they live in my memory. Perhaps it is from her that I get my desire to write?

The one of the most surprising gifts from my mom came on my wedding day two years ago. I flew my brother out to be there and a day before the wedding he handed me a piece of paper. A newspaper clipping his grandmother had saved for nearly 30 years. All yellowed. It was a poem my mother had written and published in the local newspaper. She published it as a thank you to the small Minnesota town that had given her support while I was in the hospital for a year, surviving my many surgeries to correct my birth defects. It was a poem about me.


Golden Girl

She's watching all that you say and do 
'weighing, surveying the world and you...
and absorbing more than you might surmise...
My Golden Girl with the searching eyes.

The cocoon of childhood protects her still...
With dreams to which she retreats at will...
But has she the treasures to take their place
when tomorrow’s world is hers to face?

Give her the gift with the lift of wings...
....teach her...
the love of beautiful things.