on saying her name one more time
we are who we are to each other
I miss my mommy.
This is my primary mode of thought during the week before I turn 31. It is weird, missing someone you don’t know, or never knew. It’s been 25 years now of not knowing her, and the memories I’ve managed to keep are so puny and fuzzy in the back of my mind. I’ve relegated them to a sensation, almost; the emotion of what it felt like to be someone with a mom who was not dead, channeled through my toddler body, imprinted on me for the rest of my life. That is what I try to hold close, rather than the tangible memories that have lasted:
(holding a surprise behind her back, revealing a lion Beanie Baby;
asking me to grab toilet paper from the bathroom and making fun of me for crumpling it up in my paw, instead of folding the squares;
coming home late at night and giving me a small bag of Pirate’s Booty;
rubbing calamine lotion all over me on Block Island because I had chicken pox)
These are the shreds that are left, my remnants of the concept of mom.
I do think a lot about moms and mothers in general and the kind of person I would be if I had one. For a long time, I romanticized it: I daydreamed of going shopping together, of asking her what she thinks of my outfit, of doing those weird mother-daughter afternoon tea party dates with ornate ceramic teapots and tiered trays of cucumber finger sandwiches (I don’t know why this was the vision). She was the first person who dressed me, and as someone who hates when other people buy me clothing, I still yearn for her discerning eye.
In reality, I know having a mom is harder than that. When you’re motherless, eventually, you learn what the concept of mom is like through popular culture, and then that churns together in reality from the people you know. I frequently interacted with my friend’s moms who are the antithesis of the popular idea we have about mothers. I met moms that scared me, moms that were enacting psychological warfare on their children. Realistically, I know me and my mom would have fought; and if I could take an educated guess, she would be critical of my lazy nature.
I do also think that her love for me has persevered long enough to create this version of myself in her image. The me who stands before you today is not one that knows what having a mom is like, but I am learning what it means to love myself through her lens: by emulating her as much as possible, using what I know about her as a tool to create my own future.
When I was in therapy, I lamented for a long time about how I didn’t know what kind of person my mom was, or what our relationship would look like. My therapist responded with something incredible: that what she was actually like did not matter. The truth was that she was gone. What did matter, though, was the way I thought of her, since it still affected me so much. He told me that I was allowed to think of her in whatever way I needed to in order to sustain our relationship in my imagination, since that’s where it lives.
It blew my mind to think of her in this way. But he was right. My grief prevented me from seeing the obvious solution because it was so ingrained in my stature; to have this beautiful, dead, martyr mother.
So now, my mom is whatever I want. In my daydreams, I am calling her every day and yapping. She’s teaching me how to ruche fabric so I can sew a tube top. I invent fun scenarios that could escalate in various ways, like how she’d react to my tattoos or me being gay, but where we would meet that conflict together.
When you allow yourself the freedom to make myths about lives you can never live, it becomes so much easier to take ownership of the one you do.
When I asked my aunt about her true nature (another thing my therapist suggested) it kept coming back that my mom loved to party. Work hard and play hard, that was your mom.
The times where I feel closest to her are on the dance floor, with more than one substance inside my body. She snuck out of the rural Wisconsin farm my grandparents call home when she was a teen and went to discotheques in Milwaukee, 3+ hours away. She once dated a Columbian coke dealer in the 80’s (allegedly). And when she was getting flown out to Hong Kong or Milan to do fashion research in the 90’s, I know for a fact she was partying there, too.
On the dance floor, I play God and silently say a prayer just because I can, thanking her for imbuing me with the spirit to shake ass in the basement of a warehouse loft in Pilsen, and drugs for bringing me closer to her. It is here, with dilated eyes, that I truly am my mother’s daughter.
I am trying to nurture the talents she’s given me now because of the love I have for her; because of the love I know she has for me. I have taken steadfast care of being a fashion girly, one of the main tenets of my ego. For my birthday, I sewed together a swan head and neck out of felt, stuffing it with a pillow that got busted. I only used needle and thread, but it felt good to construct something from a pattern I created.
God, I am nowhere near as good of an artist as her, but I am trying to draw, to sketch, to hone in on the little characters I create. These things ebb and flow alongside the distinct practices that are wholly my own, like writing, tattooing (allegedly), and maybe a tiny amount of graphic design.
I have to try my hand at these things because it’s what she would want, and if I’m a part of her, then that means I want it too.
I have to want.
I need to want.
Obviously, just like all times of spiritual crisis, I’ve been going back to astrology. After learning a little more about my placements, I watched a video about Virgo risings where the astrologer said that these people tend to become bosom buddies with their moms, having a relationship that resembled best friends as adults. It doesn’t take much to make me cry these days.
When I brought this up to my best friend, lamenting over my agonies, she said, “You have a better relationship with your mom than a lot of people do.”
The thing is, I think there is an innate part of me that knows this to be true. If she was given the privilege of growing old, we would know for sure. But she wasn’t. And so I’m left here, with the fuzziest memories of a woman from a toddler’s perspective, trying to figure out what shape she’d take as I too, grow older.
It is this imaginary shape I contend with on the regular these days, trying to figure out how to guide myself through the path of my own adulthood as an active recipient of her love.
It’s hard. There are days, weeks, where I slip back into shame spirals. But it’s so important that I maintain what are, frankly, grandeur delusions about my dead mom cheering me on. It’s the only place where I can give myself permission to try and grow, for now.
So long as I live, I will sit with my mother’s name in my mouth and in my hands, kneading together the life we deserved to earn together.
The world we live in is crazy and tests my ability to believe in goodness every day. It does feel like I’m watching an empire crumble right before my eyes, and shit is so fucking scary. I love my beautiful, twisted, demented country so much, and all of the people I love live here. The horrors the powers that be have deemed normal sicken me, both domestically and abroad.
But I have to believe in good. I have to continue to love.
I have to try.
I have to want.
My mommy says she loves me!
So I love you all, too.
XOXO
Liv
truly torn and moved and ready to party hardy after reading this. ily!!
Love <3