Mama

Dear Emily,
Yesterday was the 15 year anniversary of the death of our mom. Honestly, every December 7th, I just try to hustle my way through the day, so that I can get to the 8th. Not because I don’t mourn for my mother, but because EVERYONE who knew her mourns for her on this day and I just don’t want to focus on the sadness. I want to focus on her vibrant, life loving existence, and the little time I got to bask in it. This morning, thinking about it all, I found myself stuck on the word “Mama”. I tossed the word around in my head for a few minutes, and even said it out loud a few times. It sounded…strange - almost a lost word. Like something from a dead language that you only say a few times a year, “carpe diem”. I don’t say it enough anymore for it to roll of my tongue.

Mama was her name. And it was the essence of what she was once my sisters and I came along. I don’t mean this to say that she was primarily a mother. In fact, I mean the opposite. She was primarily herself – motivated, loving, caring, strong, quick to stand up for the weak, quick to question the unquestionable. She was incredibly open to others’ opinions, but not afraid to express her own. And those parts of her, those true and rare facets of her personality were what made her Mama. Her life did, and yet didn’t, revolve around her four girls. And now that she’s gone, my life does, yet doesn’t, revolve around her death.

I don’t wake up every morning thinking about her. But I often go to sleep with something she said or did on my mind. I seek out the ways I am like her, and sometimes hide the ways I’m not - ashamed that I may not be living up to the way Mama did it. Those tenuous threads of sameness hold me in place. They tie me to a part of my family that lives too far away to be knotted in securely. They serve as reminders of what she was, and how much I’ve been touched by attributes she passed to me and the ideals she taught.