Mother’s day is complicated.  For the most part, relationships with our collective mothers falls into one of three camps:  1) Everything is great.  2) Your relationship with motherhood is, best case, complicated. 3) Half of the mother/child combo has passed.

Up until this year, only situation #1 has ever applied to me.  I have a great relationship with my mom and my children.  We freely express our love and I don’t really feel like I need an extra day to tell my mom I love her.  I tell her I love her on a pretty frequent basis and I don’t love her extra on mother’s day.  I love her all of the time.

I disliked mother’s day for situation numbers 2 & 3.  Empathy killed it for me.

I ache for the women that only achieved motherhood for a brief, shining moment and then had it taken away, and the moms that tried so, so hard – but couldn’t ever make it happen.  I feel for the kids in foster care that got cheated out of the kind of mom I have.  I hurt for the step-mothers that give everything to their partner’s children and get forgotten because “your not my real mom”.   I see the pain of the women that have lost their mothers; even if they’ve passed at a reasonable age, the loss of a mother doesn’t sting any less.

We place so much emphasis on our perfect families and wonderful Mother’s day cards and brunches and gifts that it fills up our facebook pages and spills into the rest of the weekend.  But, in my experience anyway, mother’s day hits far more people painfully than joyfully.

For most of us, Mother’s day isn’t hand-print flowers and prom pictures and celebration of a special relationship  – it’s hard and it’s rough and it’s a day of tears and an extra glass of wine.

I don’t begrudge any mother that has what everyone wants.  I don’t begrudge anyone anything good in their lives.  Maybe motherhood is the only thing that some women have.

What we have is a day that celebrates deeply complicated emotion and circumstance.  It reaches out and stabs you with a thousand toothpicks.

So, for my friends that have lost children, could never have children, miscarried or still-delivered, my friends that have lost their mothers, my friends that are step-mothers, my friends that gave their babies to other families, my friends that are single moms with no support, my friends raising grandchildren when their own children can’t, my friends that are anxiously wait for their children to come back, my friends that have given up on their dreams of motherhood, and my friends that have escaped their own mothers (because not all mothers are good), today I think of you.  I hope your heart aches less tomorrow than it did today.

Starting next year – I will stop celebrating mother’s day and start celebrating the strong women.  The women that have propped me up when I was going to crumble under the weight of life.  The women I admire as role-models and pillars of strength.  The women that do their best every day.  The women that smile and love and give everything to everybody.  The women that get up and run when they are tired and the women that love and protect – no matter their children or mothers or the complications that go along with those titles.

I’m checking out on Mother’s day.  Instead I will absolutely use the opportunity to celebrate and appreciate the strength in all women.  They strength I see every day, mother or not.

 

This coming July 4th will be the internment for both Z and Joe.   Planning for this event really is not great.  At all.  I hate everything about it.

July 4th is two things:  1. It was Joe’s favorite holiday.  Bar none.  He lived for the 4th of July.  He, fittingly, died on the 4th of July.  2. It is our family’s vacation week.  We’ll miss Christmas or Thanksgivings or life milestones, but we do not miss the week of July 4th.

Their funerals were a respective group effort.  I’d planned his funeral as best I could before he passed;  Her funeral was an arrangement of plans and favors mushed together by people coming together to help out.  We united our pieces for that.  Their funerals were soundly group efforts.  This event is mine.  It is my opus for their lives.  My requiem for their love and spirit and shine.

I’ve made sure the clergy is available, the time is in place.  I’ve gotten word out for local hotel accommodation (birchlodge.com).  I’m menu planning, looking for seating rentals, decorations, and party favors (?).  I’ve got some live music lined up and I’m trying so, so hard to be as festive as possible.

I don’t want another horrible day in the memory of either of these two amazing people that were both jovial and fun loving.  It will be horrible because that is an inescapable part of the day.  It will be good because I am determined to love.

I’ll make sure we have a vigil campfire and the wind chimes from St. Mary’s faculty and staff will be hung up.   We will all be armed with funny stories and our favorite memories.  I’m banking on one of the older generation to not hear something correctly and get a little confused.   We will eat and drink and be merry.

This would have been the party I planned for her low-key wedding that she won’t have. This would have been the party I planned for the 40th birthday he didn’t make it to.

The party is getting expensive but this is the last party I’ll have specifically for either of these loves.

I want to make it nice.  I want it to be special.  I want the day to be filled with laughter and love and celebration of two lives that were perfect to me.

I want everyone in the world to be there and be happy and reminiscent and be sad and devastated.  I want to light the biggest fireworks I can find.  I want to usher in some joy even though joy will be a tall order.

A terrible reason to have a good party.  0 stars.  Would not recommend.

 

 

 

Today was the day.  The head-shaving day.

I got so anxious at work that I had to leave early.  I made myself sick to my stomach thinking about my hair.  I really do like my hair.

After some wine and chili, I went upstairs with Jay and Alex.  The first cut was rather dramatic.  By the end I was just annoyed at how long it took.  I had a lot of hair that had to be taken off and it was not coming easily.  Alex took over the cutting situation.  Jay had to finish the job.

I was in charge of all Joe’s haircuts.  One summer I carved a mohowk into his head for our week in the outer banks. I kept it trim sometimes.  Other times it got real wily.   He had his clippers and for all the years we were together, he was part of the Dr. Amy special haircuts program.  There were others on the program.  Including my dad once.  But just once.  (I mean, it was just one small patch).  After Joe passed, I moved his clippers with me.  They went on to cut more hair and then eventually they got put into the top of the bathroom closet.  As with a lot of weird items, I have an emotional attachment to something that really needed to be thrown away.

I cut off my hair with his clippers.

Z also sported this look for a while.  Three Haircuts day was a part of that.  With little exception, she lived with and passed away with short hair.  She would have loved every minute of the current situation.

With all of the haircuts I’ve given looming just inside the clippers, I made the plunge.  I drank from my Mary Poppins mug, I had the balance of my family with me in the bathroom.  It was a group effort.

I could almost hear Z behind me, giddy with excitement.  It wasn’t all Z.  It was Alex, giddy with excitement for the change.  Alex and Z.  And Joe.  And all of the rock-and-roll in my life cheering into the universe around me while Jay finished what I could not.

0 stars.  Would not recommend.

 

I’m having surgery on my head this coming Friday.  Six incisions.  Most all of the hair on top of my head has to be shaved off plus a patch above my ear and another spot on the back of my head.  It sounds way worse than it actually is.  Had I taken care of my situation 10 years ago, I wouldn’t be staring down the business end of a #2 guard on my clippers.  My surgeon advised the most prudent thing would be for me to take all of my hair off.  So much has to come off the top center that leaving unshaved portions would be ridiculous at best.  When I talked with my hairdresser, I told her I needed to make an appointment to have her shave my head the day before the surgery.

She told me no.  Absolutely not.  She’d clean it up post-op, but the actual shaving would be something I do *for myself*.

Head shaving is an emotional operation.  It is not a time to surrender my emotions to the salon and everybody in that day.  It will be cathartic. I need to own it.

As with most adults, I’ve been to several funerals and burials.  When I arrive at the cemetery, the hole is open and everything is set and ready for a quick abdication of life into earth.  Prayers, grief, hugs, casket into prepared hole, and we’re off to lunch.  It’s a swift symphony practiced to the Nth degree by all end-of-life professionals.

Things are different in the UP.  Rules are more… interpretive (?). This summer, I have the option to dig the hole for Z and Joe’s urns myself.  Just like in the old-timey movies, the family goes early, does the digging and the filling.  No prepped site, a DIY situation any of us would be wholly unprepared for.

I really struggle with this option.  It is at once paralyzingly fearful and fittingly perfect.  I brought this girl into the world with labor, I cared for him with my labor. I can put them back to the universe with labor.  I can and do this last physical act on their behalf.  I can sweat out the grief I’ll have pent up that day.  I can bring my family along for that ride and we can work it out together.

Maybe digging the hole will be the actual catharsis I need in the burial rite.  Maybe it will be a thousand degrees and I’ll wonder who made this dumb decision and why isn’t the professional there with his powered equipment.

Also maybe I’ve turned the proposed hole-digging transaction into a scene from an overly-dramatic ham-fisted movie assigned a “C” grade in Entertainment Weekly.

Whatever the case, I have plenty of opportunity for profound melodrama in the upcoming season.  I really do have a need for a physical change to marker this time in my life and the universe is answering that in spades.  My bald-headed self in a sweltering July cemetery  digging a stupid hole for these stupid urns that I didn’t ask for.   The picture itself is ridiculous beyond what I could have ever imagined.

And probably achingly cathartic.  Which is something I need*.

Solidly 0 stars.  Would not recommend.

*Dear universe:  I also need to win a powerball.  Since my life seems to be winning insane odds in tragedy, please ante in on that as well.