It’s the mundane everyday moments that catch me unaware. I hop into my car at the end of a work day, reach for my phone to call my mom — and it hits me. Mom won’t be receiving phone calls any more.
The obvious moments are emotional, of course, but you can see those coming — the moment she stopped breathing, when the funeral home employees loaded her onto a gurney and gave me a minute to say goodbye, when I wrote a note to her only sister telling her how special she was to mom — each of these moments made me sob, of course, but they were not surprising.
It’s when I’m standing at communion and the pastor touches my am and says something about the “communion of the saints” or when my high school buddy who once ensured that I was voted “moodiest” in my high school class, showed up at the church right before the service just to ask how I was doing — these moments catch me off guard and I am immediately overcome.
And it’s not just the weeping; it’s also unbridled annoyance. I think because the loss of my mother is so fresh, because I’m still spending a lot of emotional and cognitive energy trying to believe that it’s real, I get annoyed at things that normally wouldn’t phase me. This is not a passing irritation, it’s a funk that settles on my face that leaks out of my mouth in the form of tone— the kind of tone you wouldn’t dare take with your mother.
This funk settled on me a week or so ago after a pretty run-of-the-mill series of events. First my supervisor sent me an email outlining my failure to update a document according to her specifications, then I received a delivery of a shirt that was supposed to be 100% cotton that certainly was not, then I proceeded to spend too much time weeding the garden when the day was well over 90 degrees. I came into the house in an overheated body, perseverating over the email and trying to initiate a return of the shirt when my husband cheerily arrived home and asked me a benign question. I unknowingly snarled my response (thank you, funk). A few minutes later, he asked an unrelated benign question and I, again unintentionally, snapped an answer. By this time, he had a valid response, which I didn’t know how to process — not with all the grief encased in irritation. No. At this point, I was on overload.
And what did I do? Did I talk through the situation with maturity? take ownership of my feelings? apologize?
No.
I retreated, withdrew, isolated.
For 36 hours.
And then, because we had a road trip on the calendar, I forced myself, sitting in my co-pilot seat, to open the vault, messily let go of irritation, and find, once again, the tears, the grief, the loss, the reality.
These emotional expressions, I’ll call them that, are not new to me. I have not seen them in a long while, but they feel very familiar. They take me right back to my childhood and adolescence when my parents divorced and my dad was living in another state. That was my first time experiencing deep grief — the practical loss of my dad. He’s still living, at almost 88, but since the time that I was about 8, he’s been removed, at a distance, no longer accessible in the ways that a girl needs and wants her dad to be, so it makes sense to me now — now that I’m an adult experiencing the loss of a parent — that those feelings I felt in my childhood were real, and though valid, outside of my control.
However, at that time, I was the only one of my siblings that I remember emoting in such a way. My two brothers and my sister seemed fine. They were getting on with life, while I was throwing myself on my bed sobbing, lashing out in anger and sarcasm, and generally feeling volatile.
Others apparently thought me volatile, too, because the feedback I remember getting was to quiet down, stop crying, and get a hold of myself.
I, at 8 or 10 or 14, didn’t have the self-awareness or the language to say, “I feel betrayed by my parents, devastated by their divorce, and totally unmoored,” and even if had, in 1976 or 1981, what would those around me have said? “Oh, well, didn’t that happen a while ago? Your parents didn’t die did they?” In other words, get over it.
The people around me didn’t have the awareness or the language for what to do with me, what to say to me, so they did what they knew how to do and tried to shush me.
And, feeling unmoored and ashamed of all the feelings I was having, I tried to shush. I really did, but all that did was push all the hurt down where I buttoned it up and tried not to be so moody. Over time, I learned to be a soldier, to power through, to kick butts and take names.
And, if you’ve been following this blog for any amount of time, you know that that strategy — the butt kicking and name taking — worked for a while, but it took a toll, and eventually that soldier had to put her rucksack down, but even if she hadn’t, even if she was still out in these streets large and in charge, even she might have some genuine and surprising feelings upon losing her mother.
But I am no longer a soldier — I have to remind myself of this when the irritation builds past funk into anger and I try to take out an unsuspecting customer service agent — I am no longer a soldier. I am a woman who has done years of therapy, who has spent the last twelve (12!) years bringing her vulnerability to the pages of this blog, who has learned that the best way to manage emotions is — shockingly! — to feel them, to talk about them, to write about them, to allow myself to have them.
And as I’m having all of these emotions, I am realizing that though my mom was not perfect (none of us are), she always — ALWAYS! — had my back. She flew to me when I needed her, she cheered me when I won and consoled me when I lost. She laughed with me almost every time we talked but she never — not once — cried with me.
She, too, had been shushed into silence too many times. She didn’t feel safe letting her hurt show. Vulnerability was too scary, so she soldiered through emotional and physical pain the likes of which some of us may never see. And she never once allowed herself to shed a tear — not in the 60 years that I knew her.
What a burden to carry. No wonder she was exhausted and made her exit as soon as she felt she had permission.
Let me learn from that. Let me feel each of these emotions. Let me talk about them. Let me write about them. Let me cry.
I think I’ll do a little bit of that now.
There is a time for everything…a time to weep…a time to mourn… Ecclesiastes 3:4
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