Oh Mother, Where Art Thou?

I'm not sure where my mother is. More accurately, I don't know exactly where my mother is. I know she is in Florida. I know she is most likely in St. Petersburg. I know she is living on the streets. I know she is alive, as of last week when she called my aunt and uncle in Vermont. Apart from that, she is like this loose thread that begins at my heart and travels out from there until I can no longer see the end of it, but it catches on me as I move throughout my day and I am reminded of the vague absence of her.

My relationship with my mother has been unraveling (again, those loose threads everywhere) for quite some time. The reasons are complicated, having to do with the old and familiar stories of alcohol and abuse and all the burdens they bear.


This Mother's Day was beautiful, for all the reasons I mentioned in my previous post, but there came with it a weight. I couldn't call my mother, or even write to her, to tell her how much I love her. To let her know, despite any pain her troubles have caused me, that she is my mother and without her I am missing a part of myself. I want to share with her my own journey as a mother and I can't do that. I want to thank her for the ways in which she gave her love to me pure and true. I want to tell her I remember the nights she sang to me on her guitar. I remember the time she took, despite being a single mother working full-time, to make me special breakfasts each morning. The journeys she took with us to the mountains, the ocean, the desert - the ways in which she showed us the world and made it beautiful.

I want to take the little girl in the picture and smother her with kisses, lift her up in my arms and hold her close to me, as I do my own daughter. I don't know what happened to that little girl. Whether the pain and illness to come was inevitable or self-inflicted or inflicted upon her, or all of the above.

I hope she can feel my love wherever she is. I hope that somewhere the other end of my thread is tugging at her heart. That even though her thread unravels off into a somewhere she can not see, she knows that it's my heart attached to the other end.