Nancy’s Story

This year on my birthday I realized that I had lived on this earth an equal amount of time with my mom as without.  I still go up into my attic and look through her purse that keeps the exact same contents as at the moment she died.  I look at her license picture, the lipstick she used and the $20 that she kept for a rainy day that never came.

My mother first got cancer when I was 11. Around this time she left my Dad and met another man named Joseph who was very abusive.  So when my mom wasn’t battling cancer she was battling the abuse of her boyfriend.  Joseph also drove a wedge between my mom and I and we ended up not seeing each other for about four years which also happened to be her healthy years. When she came back into my life, her cancer which had started out in her breast had invaded her bones.

When she returned we never had the same relationship as we had before she left. She had lost my trust and I felt that I was unlovable.  After all, who is so terrible that their mom leaves them?

My mom and I began to spend every weekend together shopping, cooking, eating and going to movies.  One day my mom asked me if we could go shopping for baby clothes for me to have when my children were born.  I laughed this idea off as a silly because I could never picture my mother dead despite how sick she was.  We never shopped for those clothes.

As my mom’s cancer progressed her pain increased.  She was either in pain or so medicated that she had trouble keeping her eyes open.  Eventually she entered a hospice and I had to make the decision that there would be no further medical intervention.  My mom died on Mother’s Day.  As she was dying she said, “I’m climbing the stairs”. I believe in God and I know my mother is experiencing the light and joy that she didn’t feel on earth.

I have three children now and I experienced a lot of emotional pain mothering without a mother.  I lost my Dad eight years after my mom and before I had my children.  I felt jealous anytime my friends mentioned visiting their mother, their children being babysat or special Christmas gifts.  The time of transition to becoming a mom caused me to think a lot about my early childhood and wonder how I was mothered.  I don’t know why my mother chose to only have one child or if this was a choice.  I don’t know when I began to walk or talk.  This is all lost.  The only thing I can do is make a commitment to mother my children the best I can while I am here on this earth.