Motherless on Mother’s Day

When you find yourself motherless on Mother’s Day, you become acutely aware of the hole in your heart.

Even now, 35 years motherless, the void remains, no smaller. Instead, life has grown around that wound, embraced it, enveloped it, grown up with it, made it part of who I am.

And there are times, like Mother’s Day, when the edges are sharper, the cut fresher, the pain more intense. Days like birthdays, like weddings, like graduations, when my children were born, when my parenting skills gave me great doubt, when my own children hurt so badly I couldn’t protect them from the pain, on the occasions when the reminder of a mother lost would rise up to the surface and engulf me. On those days, like Mother’s Day, my wound is fresh, my heart, just like the motherless daughter of a 22-year old, is lost.