Coming to Terms with Mom
Musings on love, empathy and perspective.
Mother’s Day always leaves me feeling ambivalent.
Movies and books that depict close mother-daughter relationships leave me feeling awkward.
I have an amazing stepmother, who I have known and loved since middle school, but never considered calling Mom.
There is just too much baggage there.
When I hear the word “Mom,” it’s loaded with nearly four decades of hurt and sadness and pain.
Mom is the person my siblings and I lost to mental illness when I was four.
Mom is the person who packed up half the furniture, our toys and baby albums and left for Boston when she lost custody.
Mom is the person who called my middle school, resulting in the assistant principal calling me down to his office where I had to explain my mom had schizophrenia.
Mom is the person who refused to come to my wedding because she was irrationally afraid of our entire family, except my siblings and I.
Mom is the person who thought John Kerry’s secret service detail were out to get her.
Mom is the person who thought the government was dumping agent orange in the tanks at a famous aquarium.
Mom is the person who I tried to build a relationship with as an adult.
Mom is the person who I tried to convince to reconnect with her mother and sister.
Mom is what I repeated calmly, and then more insistently, when she would call in a non-stop monologue . . . until my father, siblings or husband would remind me that there was no use trying when she was having a manic episode.
Mom is why police officers in uniform make me nervous.
Mom is why I am glad Boston Metro and Westchester County police receive training on encounters with people who have a mental illness.
Mom is what I think when I see someone who looks like they could be homeless.
Mom is what I dwell on when I see representations of mental illness in books, on TV and in movies.
Mom is my own personal context for news articles on cuts to government disability programs, the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.
Mom is love, empathy, and an enormous lesson in perspective.
Mom is somehow what I am now, too, although my two Little Men still call me Mommy.
I have been coming back to these thoughts over and over since my mother’s death by sudden cardiac arrest on Derby Day last year.
While mulling this over, I happened to be listening to the Five Things podcast by Tara Anderson for NPR member station WFPL, and the interview she did with Mark Schultz. When speaking to the dichotomy of being both a priest and a playwright, he quoted Bill Kane, a Jesuit priest who was also a playwright:
“Who says you get to resolve the basic tensions of your life?”
Who, indeed.
So, I think that is the actual question as I wrestle with coming to terms with the word “Mom.”
One day, my sons will call me Mom.
And it will probably be bittersweet and sad and painful.
But it will also be filled with the love, empathy and perspective a mother and child share.
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Is someone you love struggling with mental illness? Need help? Connect with resources at the National Alliance on Mental Illness at NAMI.org.
