The Mother She Was Becoming

I never realized how many different ways you could lose the same person. People tell you grief comes in waves, as though it's something predictable, something that follows the tides. They tell you you'll miss their voice, their laugh, the way they always made Thanksgiving taste so familiar. They'll warn you about birthdays that knock the wind out of you, anniversaries that feel like open wounds, the empty chair at Christmas that somehow takes up more space than anyone sitting in it ever did. They tell you to expect silence where there used to be conversation and a house that somehow sounds louder because one heartbeat is missing from it. They prepare you for absence. What no one tells you is that sometimes the person you bury isn't just one person. Sometimes they're a lifetime of versions, layered on top of one another like old photographs that no longer line up. Sometimes grief isn't reaching into one empty space. Sometimes it's reaching into a dozen different ones, discovering each version of them is gone in its own unique way, and realizing you have to mourn every single one separately.

My mom was one of those people. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized that when I think of her, I don't remember just one woman. I remember seasons. I remember chapters. I remember entirely different versions of the same person, each one shaped by whatever life had placed on her shoulders at the time. Grief keeps handing me those memories like a stack of old photographs, asking me to believe they all belong in the same album. There was the mother I knew growing up. The one who was exhausted in ways I was too young to understand and too young to forgive. The one who loved us, I know she did, but whose love often had to fight its way through stress, heartbreak, survival, and wounds she never learned how to dress. She carried so much that there were days it spilled over onto us before she ever had the chance to set it down. I spent so many years wishing she would notice me a little more, choose me a little more, ask one more question before assuming she already knew the answer. Wishing that I could feel like someone's first thought instead of an afterthought. I loved her because she’s my mother, but there was always a quiet ache living beside that love, a little girl who couldn't stop wondering what it might feel like to be mothered differently. And then... there was the woman who met my daughter.

The moment Melody was born, something shifted. I don't know if I could have named it then, because it didn't happen all at once. It wasn't some dramatic, movie-worthy transformation where everything suddenly became perfect. It happened quietly, in the little things. In the way her voice grew gentler when she spoke to me. In the way she reached for Melody before anyone had to ask. In the phone calls just to see how we were doing. In the way she wanted to know every tiny milestone, every funny story, every new word, every fever, every scraped knee, as though none of it was too small to matter. She laughed more than I remembered. She smiled with her whole face. She became patient in ways I had never seen before, making room for curiosity instead of frustration, for grace instead of criticism. Watching her with Melody felt like watching spring arrive after believing winter was the only season the world had ever known. She became the kind of grandmother every child deserves, and somewhere between bedtime stories, kisses on little foreheads, and the countless ordinary moments that never make it into family photo albums, she quietly became the mother I had spent my entire childhood waiting for. I don't think either of us realized it was happening while we were living it. I just remember looking up one day and thinking, There you are. I've been looking for you my whole life.

I don't know what to do with that. I don't know where to put a grief that asks me to hold gratitude and heartbreak in the same trembling hands. Am I supposed to celebrate that I finally got the mother I had always needed, or mourn the years we lost before she found her way to me? Can both be true without making me a terrible daughter? I catch myself thinking, Why couldn't it have always been like this? and the thought barely has time to exist before guilt crashes into it like a wave determined to drag it back under. It steals the air from my lungs. It makes me feel disloyal. Because she's gone now. Because there is no conversation left to have. No chance to ask questions I never had the courage to ask when she was here. No opportunity for her to tell me she was trying, or that she was sorry, or that she simply didn't know how to be a good mother because she never had one herself. It feels unbearably cruel to ask those questions of someone who can no longer answer them, as though I'm putting the woman I love on trial after she's already been laid to rest. So instead, I put myself on trial. Every memory becomes evidence. Every longing becomes a confession. 

I hate myself for wondering if those last several years were the woman she had always wanted to be for us but simply didn't know how to become after so much damage was already done. I hate that my mind keeps trying to rewrite timelines that no longer exist, imagining what my childhood might have looked like if the mother who tucked Melody into bed had been the one waiting for me after school. If the woman who called just to ask how my day had gone had been there when I was little. If the grandmother who wanted to hear every funny thing her grandchildren said, who celebrated every milestone like it was the greatest accomplishment in history, had been the mother I ran to with my own fears. I don't resent that my children got that version of her. God, I am so thankful they did. If anything, I would have gladly given up my own childhood all over again if it meant they always knew that kind of love. But there is still a little girl inside me who cannot help but ache for what she now knows was possible. She isn't jealous of Melody. She is simply heartbroken that she finally got to meet the mother she'd been praying for... just in time to lose her. And maybe that's what I've been grieving all along without knowing how to name it. I didn't just lose my mom that day. I lost the chance to keep knowing the woman she had fought so hard to become.

It feels wrong even now to say that Chris and I grew up with a different version of my mom than our older brother and sister did. People like to believe there is one childhood, one mother, one shared history sitting neatly inside a family, but that's never really true, is it? Parents are changing while we're growing up. Life is changing them. Time is changing them. Sometimes they're becoming softer. Sometimes they're becoming harder. Sometimes they're simply trying to survive. Truthfully, I grew up with a different mother than even Chris did, despite sharing so much of the same home for most of our lives. We each caught different pieces of her. Different storms. Different sunshine. Different seasons. Chris and I talk about her sometimes, and those conversations are harder than I ever imagined they would be. It's like we're both trying to assemble the same puzzle, only half the pieces in his box don't match the ones in mine. We sit there carefully placing memories on the table between us, turning them over in our hands, trying to figure out where they belong. If we remember the hard years, it feels like we're betraying the woman she fought so hard to become. If we only remember the gentle years, it feels like we're abandoning the children who survived the earlier ones. So we stumble. We spend entire conversations speaking in half-sentences. "Remember when..." And then we stop. Not because we forgot the ending, but because neither of us knows which ending we're supposed to tell now, and suddenly they don't feel safe anymore. We laugh until one of us remembers something that changes the room. We cry over moments the other never even knew happened. And sometimes, before we tell the truth, we apologize, as though honesty about someone we love has somehow become an act that requires forgiveness.

I don't think either of us knows which version of our mom we're supposed to grieve, or maybe which version we're allowed to grieve fully. Is it the woman who left little cracks in us that adulthood is still trying to fill? Is it the woman who spent the last several years quietly filling some of those cracks herself? Can you mourn both without feeling like you've betrayed one of them? Maybe that's the cruelest part... Not that she changed too late, but that she changed at all. Because change means hope. It means redemption. It means looking at someone and realizing they were never as finished as you thought they were. She started calling just because she missed me. She asked how I was before asking what I needed. She lingered at the door instead of rushing home. She stayed a little longer every visit. Redemption didn't arrive all at once. It sounded like ordinary conversations we'd never had before. She gave me just enough time to see the woman she was becoming, just enough time to believe that healing wasn't just possible for me, but for her, too. She let me glimpse the relationship I had spent my childhood imagining, then life closed the door before either of us had the chance to fully walk through it. There is something uniquely painful about being handed the map to a place you've searched for your whole life, only to discover the bridge has already collapsed. I know now what was possible. I know what we had both been reaching toward without even realizing it. And now, somehow, I'm supposed to learn how to be a mother while carrying the absence of the woman who had only just begun teaching me what that looked like.

Some days I still catch myself reaching for my phone before my brain has time to remember what my heart already knows. It isn't for some earth-shattering crisis or life-changing decision. It's always something wonderfully ordinary. What do you do when your toddler has a fever that won't break? Did I ever refuse to eat vegetables like this? Does this rash look normal to you? Is this just a phase, or should I be worried? Sometimes I don't even have a question. I just want to tell her about something Melody said that made me laugh so hard I cried, or complain that motherhood is exhausting today, or hear her say, "You'll figure it out," the way mothers somehow always know to do. Those were the conversations we had finally started having. The small ones. The everyday ones. The ones you never think to treasure because you assume there will be thousands more. My hand reaches for the phone before my mind can stop it, as naturally as breathing, and for the smallest fraction of a second, the world is exactly as it should be. Then reality catches up. My fingers freeze. The silence rushes in. And I have to teach myself, all over again, that there isn't a number I can dial to hear my mom's voice anymore. It's astonishing how something as simple as setting your phone back down can feel like attending another funeral.

Melody turned eight two weeks after she died. Eight years. Somehow, that number became a lifeline I cling to because eight years feels like enough to remember. Enough to hear her grandmother's voice in her head someday. Enough to remember the way she laughed, the way she hugged, the little traditions they shared, the feeling of being loved by her. But Punky was only five. Buddha was four. Blue had just celebrated her first birthday. They’re still so little that their memories feel fragile, like words written in sand just before the tide rolls in. I’m terrified that one day they’ll look at her picture and not recognize the woman smiling back at them. That her voice will disappear first, then her laugh, then the way she smelled when she hugged them, until eventually all that remains is a name attached to stories someone else tells. I want to freeze time, to bottle every memory before it slips through their tiny fingers. I find myself repeating stories they’re too young to understand, pointing at photographs they’re too young to remember, desperate to build memories where there are already only echoes. Because the thought of losing my mother is unbearable enough. The thought of my children slowly losing her, too… without even realizing they were forgetting, feels like watching her die a second time, only this time in slow motion. And somewhere beneath all of that fear is another one I can’t bring myself to say out loud: one day, I will become the keeper of everything they will ever know about her. It will be my voice telling them who she was, my memories standing in for the ones they never got the chance to make. And suddenly I understand that while I am grieving the loss of my mother, my children are quietly beginning to grieve the loss of their grandmother, even if they’re too young to know that's what it’s called. I want so badly to protect them from that kind of forgetting, but I can't even protect myself. I’m still trying to learn how to live without my mom. Somehow, I’m supposed to teach them how to remember her.

Motherhood was already terrifying before I lost her. Every decision already felt like a coin toss between getting it right and accidentally giving my children something they’ll spend the rest of their lives trying to heal from. Doing it without the person who had only just begun teaching me what motherhood could look like feels impossible. I look at Melody sometimes while she's sleeping, completely unaware that I'm sitting beside her, trying to memorize every inch of her face because I'm so afraid of becoming someone she has to recover from. I wonder what she'll remember when she's grown. Will she remember the nights I lost my patience because I was exhausted, or the ones I stayed up rubbing her back until the sun came up because she had a nightmare? Will she remember the anxiety that sometimes steals pieces of me, or the way I fought through it because she needed me? The mother who got it wrong? The mother who kept trying anyway? The one who loved her so fiercely it sometimes came out as fear? Maybe that's what hurts the most. Maybe becoming a mother has forced me to look back at my own with different eyes. Because for the first time in my life, I understand that a child doesn't remember every sacrifice you made in silence. They remember the version of you that stood in front of them. And I can't stop wondering which version of me will live inside my children long after I'm gone.

Maybe loving my own children has taught me just how much room there is for regret inside a mother's heart. Before I became one, I think I believed mothers simply knew what to do… that love naturally translated into patience, wisdom, and all the right words at exactly the right time. Now I know better. Now I know that sometimes you can love your child with every fiber of your being and still lie awake at night replaying the moments you wish you could take back. I don't think my mom woke up every morning wanting to fall short. I don't think she looked at us and chose distance over closeness or frustration over gentleness. I think she was surviving the only way she knew how. I think she was carrying hurts she didn't have names for, fighting battles she didn't know how to win, trying to pour from a cup that had been empty for far longer than I ever realized. And somewhere along the way, she learned another way to love. I was lucky enough to see it. Lucky enough to feel it. Lucky enough to finally understand that people are not fixed points, they are still becoming, even after we think we know them. That's what makes this grief so impossible to hold. Not because I needed a perfect childhood. Not because I wanted to erase the years that hurt. But because after spending so much of my life wondering what it would feel like to truly have a mother, I finally did... and just as I reached the version of her I'd spent my whole life looking for, death reached her first.

Author’s Note:
Originally Written: February 19, 2018 - The day I realized some grief comes from finally getting what you always needed.

Eight years have passed since I wrote this. Reading it now feels a little like opening a time capsule and discovering the person who buried it was trying to leave me a warning. I can feel how desperately I was trying to hold onto everything before it slipped away. I believed if I worried hard enough, remembered hard enough, repeated enough stories, maybe I could outrun time. Spoiler, I couldn't.

Melody is seventeen now, and she still talks about my mom. Sometimes she'll point out something completely ordinary I do with ”Mawmaw used to do that," or "She would've loved this”, and for a second it feels like my mom walks back into the room. She remembers her voice. She remembers being loved by her. She remembers enough that their relationship still belongs to both of them, not just to me. The others were simply too little.

Maybe that's why I held onto the number eight so desperately when I first wrote this. Because somewhere deep down, I already knew what time was capable of. I was eight years old when I lost my own grandmother. I loved her deeply. I know I did. But if I'm being honest, time has stolen pieces of her from me, too. There are days I can barely remember the sound of her voice. Days when I have to work to picture her smile. Sometimes I can remember exactly how it felt to be loved by her, but I struggle to remember a single conversation we ever had. Other times, I panic because it feels like I can't remember anything about her at all. That realization has always terrified me. Not because I loved her any less, but because memory has a way of quietly sanding down even the people who shaped us most. Looking back now, I realize I wasn't just afraid my children would forget my mom. I was afraid because I already knew exactly what forgetting felt like.

One of the hardest truths I've had to learn is that children don't just lose people differently. Sometimes they lose them twice. First, when they die, and then again when the memories quietly disappear. The little ones don't really remember her anymore. They know who she was because I've told them. They know stories. They know photographs. They know the version of her I've spent years trying to keep alive with my words. But they don't know her the way Melody does. The same is true of Chris. They know they had an uncle who adored them, but they don't remember the sound of his voice calling their names, or the way he'd scoop them onto his shoulders, or how much bigger, and somehow safer, the world looked from up there. Time took those things so gently that none of us noticed they were leaving.

There is one memory, though, that still catches in my throat. Punky was with me the day I found my mom. For a long time afterward, she clung to her in ways that broke my heart. She wanted to love the things my mom loved. My mom had always dreamed of swimming with dolphins, so that became her dream. So, for her eighth birthday, we made it happen. I still remember watching her climb out of the water with the biggest smile on her face before she looked at me and said, "Mawmaw would've loved this." I don't think she realized it then, but she was trying to keep Mom alive the only way a little girl knew how. As the years passed, though, she stopped bringing her up. She stopped asking questions. I think remembering became heavier than forgetting. Sometimes surviving looks less like holding on and more like quietly setting something down.

When I first wrote this, I thought my greatest responsibility would be making sure they never forgot. Now I know that's impossible. Memory doesn't work that way. It softens around the edges. It loses names before feelings, voices before photographs. It rewrites itself without asking permission. What I've learned instead is that love isn't measured by perfect remembrance. Sometimes it survives in ways memory doesn't. Sometimes it's a child who instinctively offers comfort the way her grandmother once did, without realizing where she learned it. Sometimes it's a laugh that sounds familiar for reasons no one can explain. Sometimes it's kindness that gets passed down so naturally it no longer has a name attached to it.

I can't make my children remember my mother. I can't make them remember Chris. But I can keep telling their stories until one day, those stories become part of my children's stories, too. Maybe that was always the job. Not to stop time from taking memories…. Just to make sure love outlives them.