I miss you, Mom

I was ten years old when I lost my mother.

I say ten, because that’s when I started to feel her begin to drift, long before her body finally gave in. I was only 10! It was the year she stopped being the supermom I knew. The year her shoes went on the wrong feet. The year she forgot her signature. The year she stopped bathing regularly and started repeating the same stories, looping through memory and slipping away everyday. The doctors diagnosed it as dementia, but to me and maybe all her loved ones it was a big sad loss. A quiet vanishing.

My own daughter, Yama, turned 10 a few days ago and I cannot imagine not being there for her. Not seeing her grow, not catching her when she falls, not helping her name her feelings or fight her fears. I look at her, so full of life and wonder, and I understand, in a way I never did before, how much my own mother’s absence stole from me. I am here for Yama with a fierceness that sometimes aches, because I know what it is to lose a mother long before she is gone.

She was still breathing, but gone.

I don’t talk much about her, apart from the Mother’s Day tribute or Birthday commemoration here and there. Not because I didn’t love her. But because I did, dearly!

I hate what grief does. It’s turned my mom’s life into a lesson, a heartbreak, a sentence that ends with a full stop and a sigh and sometimes tears. I don’t talk much about Mom, or Hlihli as many of us called her, because I don’t want to turn my mother into a sad anecdote. Another “life is hard” reminder,  one of life's painful things that we go through. Another reason to go to therapy. 

But today, I’m writing about her. I miss her more than I know how to say.

This week, her memory has wrapped itself around my thoughts like a thick scarf, warm and choking. I’ve found myself dreaming up moments that will never come to pass. Would I ask her to cook her best dish when the boy I like comes over for dinner? Would she sit at the kitchen table, peeling vegetables, seeing through my “chill” while I wait in the living room, nervous as hell, but pretending not to care?

Would I ask her to look after Yama when I’m stretched thin? The way only a grandmother could, effortlessly, with care and indulgence? Would I leave my “things” with her while I chase the wind, take a sabbatical, travel the world, write my story under foreign skies?

But here’s the thing: my sisters do all that. They hold me up. They show up. They do their best.

But they are not HER.

Maybe it’s because a mother is the first place we learn what love feels like when it doesn’t ask to be earned. She is the consistent background tune of belonging. The soft yet assertive voice that teaches you how to be in the world, not just how to survive it.

You need your mother when you bleed for the first time and don’t really know what’s happening. When your heart breaks for the first time and you think it might kill you. When you’re twenty-four, pregnant and unsure if you’re doing anything right. When you become a mother yourself and suddenly understand everything she carried in silence.

Losing her has made every step something to figure out on my own. And though I’ve learned to stand tall and firm, and even run, there are days when I long to collapse into her lap and just be small again.

So maybe I’m writing this because missing and thinking about her makes her real again, even if just for a few moments.

Maybe in sharing, I keep her with me, one thought at a time.