I was a girl when my mother died, thirteen years ago.
When she passed, my world became something else. Something dark, unknowing, fearful. It also became other things I couldn’t quite name, or understand, as the wisdom of insecurity hadn’t seeded itself yet.
After her funeral, I spent a long time in the bathroom of my brother’s apartment. First sitting on the floor and then standing up, looking at my reflection in the mirror. I was studying my hands and then my face. My face and then my hands. And I have no idea how long I was in there, searching for her.
Between my hands and my face, it was my hands that most resembled her. Not my nose or my eyes, which weren’t green like hers but hazel. Not my skin color or my pink lips or cheeks. Even our hair color was different, as well as the texture. Her natural hair color was a deep and consuming dark brown and straight, while my hair was much lighter and waved. I stood four inches taller than my mother, and my feet were two sizes larger. But my ten bony fingers were hers! I had my mother’s hands, and I was strangely grateful for this. Grateful because hands are for doing and I thought I could do a lot in her name.
Only, I didn't know what I could do — not yet anyway. So, I just kept myself busy. Though, looking back, the truth is, the reality of things hurt. A memory might float in, and I'd touch it for a moment, and then watch it float away, secretly aching for my mother.
Over the years since she passed, grieving has never felt quite complete, the process interrupted by other incredible losses and life changes, and the perennial isolation I felt, and continue to feel, without my mother — my first home, shelter.
Though I keep living each day, and the word resilience comes to mind. The ability to persevere, stand up, to weather life’s storms.
Socially, we understand, and perform through resilience, as a specific kind of strength. Fortitude. Will. Except, the more I dive into it, the more I try to expand its definition to feel somehow more inclusive, I can’t help but consider that the underbelly of resilience is a compromise. That is, only, if we disallow ourselves to see and experience our despair fully.
My emotional life felt bulwarked by my grief. At times, I couldn’t see anything beyond it. But when my father died three years ago, the dam, in a way, was released. I entered into a wild period of confrontation with my pain body — all the emotional wounds, the trauma of living, all right there, colorful, painful, terrifying, and I found what my hands, and my pain, were meant to do — write.
To get there, I entered into a period of self-study. In this way, finally, instead of rushing through, I cocooned myself in my hurt. I felt that the only way to move on and live with integrity, self-respect, to cultivate compassion, and love, would be to know my hurt, to understand it, to knit my hands with it, neither holding onto it nor letting it go before it’s time. And it would be in this way, that I could draw actual, beautiful, immense, even provocative strength from it. The only thing I hadn’t anticipated was that it would take time — a lot of time. Slow like molasses time.
