Mother’s Day is one of those holidays that I face with ambivalence, not because I think it’s some artificial Hallmark holiday, or because it reinforces antiquated notions of gender, but because, for all intents and purposes I was motherless most of my life.  Even after the birth of my son the holiday provoked, at best, a mix of emotions.

I don’t write a lot about my mom or the impact both her presence and absence have had on my life.  But needless to say both have been profound and both are far too ubiquitous to summarize nicely in a blog post.  But today, I’m dipping a toe in.

That’s because for the first time in, well, ever, I spent part of the Mother’s Day holiday at her grave.  With my son.

It was the first time I’d taken Owen to her gravesite.  I didn’t really have a plan for how it would go, or when it would happen.  I just figured he’d give me the clues for when the time was right, and sure enough, he did.

See, even talking about Annette with him is complicated.  She died six weeks after my wedding after a decades-long suicide march of untreated mental illness and substance abuse.  Throughout the course of her many illnesses my mother became abusive.  She abandoned us, only to return with pledges of reformation and redemption.  She upended every ounce of security a child could have and forced us all to grow up really damn fast.  And after one near-death experience she even graced us with a year or two of sobriety and actual involvement in our lives, which of course was in so many ways the cruelest of gifts as we witnessed her determined and inevitable spiral back into darkness. The last time I saw her alive was at my wedding.  She was barely functional and the fact that she showed up was as much a shock and a horror to me.  But she knew she was dying, and in hindsight, so did I.  The thing is, to me, she’d been dying since I was a little girl.

But she was also more than the sums of her flaws.  She was among the first women to graduate from law school in Nebraska.  I was a toddler when she graduated and some of my first memories are of going to her law office on the weekends.  She was political, passionate, and driven.  She even sang me songs and helped me get over boy crushes.  She took me shopping and called me beautiful.  She was my mom.  For good and for bad.  My mom.

Once I found out I was pregnant I knew that eventually I’d have to confront both the story of her life and the story of her death.  That of course placed me in the familiar role of being narrative-less, or more accurately, of having to write my own narrative on motherhood.  Culture gives us some, even for the mom’s that aren’t quite so, well, maternal.  We have the suffering matriarch, the evil-step mother, and now even the soccer mom.  But there’s no story for the mom that wasn’t there, or that flitted in and out of your life too consumed by her own demons to really ever be present.  Mommy Dearest okay, but this is so much more than wire hangers and vanity.  And if I couldn’t even make sense of my mother’s impact and legacy for myself, how was I going to explain it to a child let alone to my own child?

Eventually, I started to, which lead, in part, to an early introduction to the concept of death.  And grieving.  And that whole, messy process of living with a loss.  By the time it came up I thought I had it intellectualized to the point where I was prepared for the questions, and for the most part, I think I was.

But I was not prepared for the idea that Owen would have a sense of loss of his own, of a desire and a need to go through the grieving process for a person he never knew.  So I was totally unprepared when, at 5, he told me he wanted to go to the cemetery to visit Annette.  I was totally unprepared when he told me that she loved him and he missed her.  And I was totally unprepared for those declarations to come on Mother’s Day.

But there I was.  With my grandmother and my sister, watching my son place pink geraniums on the grave of a woman he never knew, grieving a grandmother who would never bake cookies, never smell of mothballs, and never usurp his mother’s authority and give him ice cream before dinner--and not because she had died, but because she just couldn’t be that woman.  Before I could blink back a tear there he was, my precious little boy, smiling up at me right after showing his respects, and asking if we could go to Target now and pick out a toy.  And I said yes, as much for him as for Annette who, in all honesty, probably wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Originally published at Hegemommy and BlogHer