"SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE A MOTHERLESS CHILD"

"Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, So far away."

-"Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child, Harry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949)

When I restarted this blog a few weeks ago, I wanted to try and write every day...as an outlet for writing, as an exercise for my revised book proposal. And, I was all over it, every M-F day, loving it. And then I began this piece on my Mother one morning about a week ago. I wrote until I had to leave the house, and then for the next at least 7 days, it just sat there. Unfinished. And I started to notice that each day the Pink Elephant kept getting pinker. The rationale more confused. Why wasn't I justg finishing it? I couldn't figure out why. What was catching-in my throat, what was getting in my way, inside me...I'm still not sure, maybe it's what/who I was writing about, or maybe it was the door through which I was entering this musing that, once I paused, felt somewhat unnerving. You see, I'm not much into "what-if" stories at this point i n my life. Maybe at another time, it would have been somewhat satisfying. The story. Any story. Now, I really don't care as much. About my own story. Must be why one of my newest favorite phrases is "It is what it is." Plain and simple. VERY short story. Helps me to focus on what is, not on what isn't. Definitely cuts down on the drama. Less frustration. Less disappointment. And, I have been craving less drama (and frustration and disappointment), and I knew that it had to start with me. So, maybe I just got entangled inside with this "what-if," the deeper sadness, and I just didn't want to go there...because it's so vast...the notion of how one's life would be unrecognizable if someone elemental to one's life, a parent in this case, had not had the life that they did...because it really doesn't matter...since I began this piece, something shifted inside, even slightly, and I just wasn't compelled to follow that thread...at least for these days...I knew I had to finish though, some moment would just find me "here", inspired, once I hit the metaphorical "send," to simply move on...the following is what I had written...I'm just leaving it alone...for now...

My Mom died when I was 18. What really struck me again recently was that, to a great degree, I kind of lost her, big parts of her, when she first got breast cancer ten years before when she was 38. In those days, long before Betty Ford and other pioneers who shined lights in dark corners and brought the disease out of the closet, and provided women with an ability to be open, a sense of community, Marilyn Pillot kind of checked out in certain ways. As a Mom, a wife, a woman. She felt very much alone. Probably not just with her illness, with this horrible disease and the facing of her own mortality, but surely in her life, in her marriage. 38. Like a kid...relatively speaking. Two radical mastectomies by 39. Then 48 rolled around. Incredible to me how young that can seem, or be. The age that has nothing to do with the number. Particularly when you really never had the chance to get into second or third gear. I remember the day when I became older than she ever was...48 years, six months, 11 days. It didn't "make sense," me still feeling like a babe in the woods...she now the young one, frozen in time.

These days, what constantly comes up for me, as the son of this mother, isn't the sadness per se, or the fact that she hasn't been in my life for way longer than she was (physically), it's this unreconcileable, unanswerable notion of what my life would have been like if she hadn't been sick, if she hadn't died. What would life have been like if I "had a Mom," that constant presence, in a more ongoing way. While I always think of the life altering sliding door moments that often can be the smallest, most seemingly inconsequential choices or decisions made in real time, without forethought (walk on one side of the street versus the other, and your life can be changed), the bigger what-if's are there too. The ones that you had no choice in effecting. This is not a pityparty exercise, or an oh poor me sensibility. Losing my Mom as I did, dealing with what was before me at an early age, finding my way through and surviving as I did, certainly contributed as much to who I became, as a male, as a male who appreciates and respects and loves women, as anything else that is in my life stew. People have had it way worse than I have...and, that's not what I am focusing in on here. It is simply that occasionally gnawing what-if. What would it had been like having a go-to person, at the seemingly inconsequential moments, as much as for the biggies. "Hi, Mom, what did you think?" Or, maybe, "Mom, did you like her?" Those kinds of things. I know it's a ridiculous game, it has no end, no resolution. Given that life is a chain series of events, each one and the collective of all that have come before having an effect on the next choices, what comes next. If Mom isn't sick, if she lives a full life, then everything would have been different, where I went to college, whom I met, whom I married. My kids would not be my kids. I get all that, the circular game that has no end. And, it's simply human nature to wonder. Particularly because as I look around and listen to my friends discuss their relationships with parents both alive and dead, the conversations, whether they be the most loving, or still challenged, the underlying theme is the same. One's love of a parent.