Teach your children well

I meant to blog last weekend, but the entire weekend sort of slipped away, and then it was time to go back to work for the semester, and then I got sick. So, here's what I would have blogged last week...

Last Friday, Jan. 22, marked the two year anniversary of my mother's passing. I spent Friday night feeling pretty damned lonely, so I called Jackie, my dearest and oldest friend in the world who is also an experienced hospice social worker. She told me that the relationship Mom and I nurtured in the last years of her life was inspirational, and she remarked on the question my mother asked me about a year before her death.

One day while I was at Mom's apartment doing housework for her, she told me that she was trying to think of things she had taught me, but she couldn't think of any. She asked me what she had taught me. I was stunned at this, because I owe 90% of who I am to my mother. I rattled off a list on the spot, and over the next several months, I continued to add to the list when things came to me.

Sometimes they're little things, like how to finesse a crossword puzzle when I'm stumped, and sometimes they're basic life skills (I can still hear her teaching me to drive: "When you stop at a corner, put your head on a swivel."). Managing my natural-born temper is probably one of the most important lessons I learned from Mom. But understand - I don't mean she taught me how to manage my temper. Heh. Mom was classic Passive-Aggressive when it came to expressing her own anger. What she told me (repeatedly, ad nauseum, in fact) was that one day my temper would get me into big trouble. It hasn't really, but my temper has been an incredible teacher. By pointing out the importance of that volatile part of my personality, she helped me to learn from my own weakness, and I am a better person for it.

I miss her every day, more and more. When she died, a lot of people said to me, "It'll get easier." I don't know if that's necessarily true. The rawness of it has certainly subsided, but the ache, the distance and the emptiness ("a Momazoo-shaped hole" as I put it the night she died) have grown deeper, like the lines in my face that weren't there three years ago.

I am still thinking of things my mother taught me, and I so wish I could tell her. I expect I will for the rest of my life, so whether she hears me or not, I always say "Thank you, Momazoo."