On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess

I realize that I just wrote about my mother a month ago, but I hope that you will indulge me one more post. Today is my mother's birthday. Every year for the last many years it's a strange day for me. My mother died when I was teenage Isis and I have lived my adult life without her.

As I have reached major milestones in my life (graduation with my bachelor's degree, my wedding day, the birth of Little Isis, my second graduation), I have keenly felt her absence. While I think of her daily, it is during those times that I have really mourned for her.

But, then I remind myself that it is not actually my mother that I am mourning -- it's the absence of a mother in general. You see, as I wrote a month ago, my mother left our family when I in elementary school and our relationship devolved from there. And, as I wrote a month ago, I have lived a lot of my adult life trying not to be like my mother.

[I'm chuckling aloud in the cafe in MRU's hospital as I write this, thinking of all the undergraduates and graduate students who commented that they read my blog. Those people that are more senior than you that you look up to? We're just as fucked up as you (if not more so).]

My mother's birthday is a strange day for me. Part of it is morbidly strange. Try as I might to not let the thought cross my mind, I am less than ten years away from the age my mother was when she died. On her birthday I tend to find myself wondering if she knew with each passing year how little time she had left. I find myself wondering if she knew on the morning of her death that later in the evening she'd see our family dog hit by a car, take him to the vet, and then die on the exam room floor of the vet's office of a massive myocardial infarction. I find myself thinking that, if I end up as she did, I will never see Little Isis as a teenager, as a young adult, or as a man. I won't know his wife or my grandchildren.

It's hard not to let my mind travel down the path of the macabre on her birthday. It's also hard to celebrate the life of a woman I still find myself angry with after all these years.

So, I've recently taken to thinking of my mother's birthday as more of an anniversary of my own motherhood. I allow myself the time for all of the screwed up things I need to think about, and then I mentally recommit myself to providing for Little Isis -- to making him and his happiness my priority and the reexamine the kind of mother I have been over the last year.

My diagnosis isn't great, but it's not terminal. Sometimes I feel like I work too much, or I am too exhausted at the end of the day to really play with the intensity that he deserves, but he is also a brilliant and happy little boy. His teacher comments on occasion that he is too chatty at naptime, but he also has a wonderful vocabulary and I am proud of it. How many two year olds understand the word "chrysalis?" Little Isis still wakes up some nights crying and asking to come sleep next to me in the bed, but his affection for me also melts my heart and there is not better feeling than my snuggly baby against me. Sometimes I cop out and make macaroni and cheese instead of vegetables, but he's healthy and growing. I frequently worry and pray that he never understand financial insecurity, but he understands the concept of putting money in his piggy. That gives me hope that I haven't screwed him up too badly.

Tonight when I put him to bed I'll silently reflect on the ways I may have failed him this year, but also promise to try to do better in the future. I know that I can't promise him that I'll always be there, but I think I can promise that I'll always try to be.

I am certain that I can promise to always love him.