Here's a hard truth....God doesn't care what brand your purse is. God doesn't care how big your house is, what kind of car you drive, or how many presents are under your Christmas tree.

As a little girl, like tons of other little girls then and now, I dreamed of getting married. It wasn't just the dress, the flowers, the music, the people. I wanted the love. You know the kind; that dreamy sort of love that all the pop songs are written about. Mariah Carey's Vision of Love; that's what I wanted. But of course, being the awkward curly haired mess that I was (and still am some of the time) it just didn't happen. As a teenager, I was the popular topic of many a rumor but my imaginary life was much more exciting than my real one. I can honestly say I never once got asked to a school dance. Not even once. I always went with friends of friends or, like at my senior prom, I went with my friend's little brother. Yup, that was my life. In college, I didn't fair much better but I tried. My one gift when it came to relationships was trying to make one where one wasn't. I was always "the friend." You know, the kind with benefits who wasn't a girlfriend and would never get introduced to the friends or the parents but was around to hang out with and take advantage of. This never went well for me as it doesn't in many situations but the pattern was hard to break. Until junior year of college when I was taking a creative writing class. Creative writing classes are notoriously touchy feely and it can be a little uncomfortable for someone who avoids eye contact and talking about my life in front of strangers (me) but I did it anyway. It was credit for my major and it was relatively easy. When our professor made us set up the chairs in the classroom so that we were all facing each other in a makeshift circle, I was seated directly across from the most friendly face that I had ever seen in my life. I should mention, my chronic resting bitch face is not a recent condition. I've had it since I was little. Because of this I was particularly nervous about the friendly face before me but he didn't seem to care that I always looked like I was about to stab someone or that I rolled my eyes without noticing it sometimes. He smiled at me anyway. With his whole face. Eyes, mouth, cheeks, he almost seemed to exude happy and it was magnetic. It took almost the entire semester before we actually talked to each other and to be honest, I'm not sure who called whom or how it all went down but he invited me over to his apartment and from that day forward, I only went home when I absolutely had to. I had found it. Mariah Carey's vision and mine. Love. For the first time in my life, I was the best version of myself and someone really loved me for me. I didn't have to hide or fake it. I didn't have to run away before his friends showed up or stay quiet when his mom called. He loved me and he was proud of me and we were happy. And it lasted all of 8 weeks. I would like to tell you that we broke up, that the bubble burst. That he cheated on me. But that's not what happened. What happened was that he died. He died and he left me alone and I went from being the happiest that I'd ever been in my life to feeling the kind of grief that makes you feel like you're being buried alive. It was another major blow in my life that year. Having had an abortion and ending a relationship with someone who loved me but wasn't in love with me, I was already grieving when he came into my life and brought me to life and now I was grieving his death and my death and the death of any hope that I'd had that things were going to be ok for me, that I was going to be ok. That dreams do come true and love exists.

I'd like to say that in the 11 years that have passed, that I've found love again and love reigns supreme once more. And that's true in a way. I've never felt more perfect or terrifying love than I have for my children. When I see them, I see love. But I also see the what ifs. What if he had lived? What if these were the kids we were meant to have together? What if we had gotten our happily ever after? I have a husband. I love my husband but not the way I loved him. Our love is heavy. We our both hardened, jaded people and we struggle. And I sometimes feel like a fraud because the memory of the man that I loved first, that I loved easily, that I loved lightly, is in my mind and in my heart every day. I wonder if my husband knows that sometimes when I look at him, I'm wishing he was someone else. I wonder if he knows that sometimes I hold him to an impossible standard. I am hoping he can't tell that I still grieve and grieve hard. And I wonder if he knows that sometimes I feel like I'm cheating on my first love. The easy love. The fairy tale love. I wonder if he knows that sometimes, when the hurt is really bad, I feel like all of this is wrong.

Grief is a work in progress. It never really goes away and it can manifest itself in so many different ways. It's been 11 years and some days it feels like a lifetime ago. Some days I can barely remember his voice and other days it's like I just saw him yesterday. And I miss him. I miss the way he brought out the best in me when so often I feel like I'm falling short. I miss the way he truly believed that I could do anything. I miss the way he was always genuinely happy to see me. I miss it all. The logical side of me is very aware that at some point it might have gone away. We would have fought. Life would have gotten in the way. We would have gotten on each other's nerves or hurt each other's feelings and maybe the honeymoon would have ended. Those things could have happened but they didn't. We had 8 weeks of love the ripples of which I will feel the rest of my life. I have a lifetime of grief ahead of me but also a lifetime of memories. A lifetime of love.

Mourning Mom

I've always had a little bit of jealousy for people that have good relationships with their mothers. When I was little, I didn't know it was jealousy. I just knew that what I had in my mother wasn't what I saw around me. As I got older, I thought that maybe if I could just change myself I would be able to make my mom into the person I wanted her to be. The mom I needed her to be. But that wasn't the case. Nothing I did was ever good enough or extreme enough to jolt her into a state in which she was able to experience maternal instinct. Or at least let me experience some feeling of "mom" coming from her. The irony of the situation is that my mom is a teacher. I've watched her shower her students with affection for most of my life. Letting them hold her and touch her in the ways that I wanted too but wasn't allowed to because I was constantly in the way, or she didn't have time, or I was just too clingy too needy for her to pay any mind to. Some of my earliest memories of my mom aren't pleasant ones. I remember her smoking and crying in the dining room with all of the windows open. I remember her dismissing my tears and frustration by putting a belt on the door knob in front of my bedroom and telling me that if I continued to cry, she would give me a reason to cry. I remember wanting to touch her face and always being told that I couldn't because I would mess up her make up. I remember then watching one or another of her students touching her face and not knowing how to deal with the rejection. I remember being told that if she could go back in time, she never would have had kids. In other words, my sister and I had ruined her life and she would be happier if we didn't exist. What I don't remember is being held. Or encouraged. Or told that I was special or important or that I mattered.

As an awkward pre-teen, I remember being told that I had embarrassed her in front of one of her friends and getting back handed in the face so hard it made my nose bleed. Of course we were in the car and I bled on the upholstery so that was just more justification for her rejection. It was soon after that that I decided that I would do anything to try to please her. I had come to the conclusion that it was my fault that she couldn't or wouldn't act like a mom. So I set out to make her happy. Get good grades? Check! Lose weight? Check! Be popular and accepted by my peers? Check! I was on a quest to make her love me and would stop at nothing. It wasn't smooth sailing and by no means was I an easy child to love at this point. No. I didn't know how to accept kindness and I wasn't very good at returning it. I had a bit of a bad attitude and was "looking for love in all the wrong places" as the song goes. But I didn't know any better at this point in my life. It wasn't until my mom decided I needed therapy (in lieu of actually talking to me herself) when I was 16 that I began to get a better picture of what my family life was really like. It was that first therapist that called my mom into a session one day and explained to her that my problems wouldn't be solved by therapy alone but by her stepping up and being a better mom. Basically, what I needed was to be parented. This wasn't an easy pill to swallow for the woman who had been telling me that she was done raising her kids since my sister moved out. I was 10 when my sister moved out. Needless to say, I didn't ever go back to that particular therapist and nothing at home changed except my mother now had a reason to hate me. In her mind, I had lied to the therapist and now she had a justifiable reason to treat me the way she did. It was at this point that my mom decided that I am crazy and because I am crazy I don't deserve any respect or any thing at all really. In her eyes, I'm mentally deficient. I'm paranoid, I'm anxious, I'm angry, I'm depressed, I'm bitter. All accusations that have been hurled at me and used as justification for being treated like garbage. For my mother, this is reason enough to hate me. I won't deny that I've never felt these things. I have. We all have. I've been especially depressed, angry, and bitter when it comes to dealing with my relationship with her. I don't live there though. I don't live in my depression, I don't live in my anger, I don't live in my sadness. They are visitors in my life that show up on my door step on occasion but I don't let them stay. I refuse. My mother has never acknowledged this though and from this point on, I was not allowed to show emotion in front of her. Crying is only evidence that I am depressed. Yelling, that I am angry and bitter.

This got progressively worse through college. I moved into the dorms at 17 because she no longer wanted me at home. I did what she wanted me to do. I got good grades, I worked, I tried to be the person that she seemed to want me to be so that she would love me. And then I got pregnant. I was 19, I was a junior in college. I had gotten pregnant from a guy who was already in a relationship with somebody else (this I didn't find out until after I told him I was pregnant) and was never committed to me to begin with. I had moved back home at this point, having done a stint in the dorms and then in my sorority house. I remember very clearly the night that I told my mom I was pregnant. She actually guessed before I had said anything. My mom always anticipated the worst in me anyway, getting knocked up at 19 for the sole purpose of disgracing her was totally something that was on my agenda. And of course more fuel for her justification of her feelings toward me. I said, "I need to tell you something." She said, "Let me guess. You're pregnant." There was a long pause after which she said, "You need to get rid of it or you need to get out of my house." That was the end of it. Have an abortion or be homeless. Homeless with a kid. Of course, I was met with a similar reaction from the father of the baby. "I'm engaged to someone else, get rid of it...I'll get you the money." And sure enough, he coughed up the nearly $1,000 that it cost to have an abortion in 2004. On February 13th, 2004 I had an abortion. It was Friday the 13th. It was snowing. It was sad and it was scary and it happened.

I essentially chose between my mother and my baby and my mother won. That's how desperate I was to please her. In some way, I thought that if she saw how much I was willing to sacrifice, she would see that I loved her and she would love me back. But of course that wasn't the case and I was left now not only without the love and support of my mother, I no longer had my baby or the father of my baby in my life either. Don't get me wrong. I've come to accept that it was my decision and that it was the best decision at the time. It was also the loosening of the thread that would begin the unraveling of my desire to have my mother in my life and it was then that I gave myself permission to grieve the mom that I would never have. It was then that I came to the painful realization that she wasn't going to change and that I couldn't make her. Nothing that I could or would ever do would make her into the mom I needed so I began to let her go.

Grief in and of itself is a complicated process. The amount of time that it takes to go through the stages of grief is not set in stone and every one is different. Grieving someone who is still very much alive and well is even more complicated. There have been so many moments along the way that I've wanted my mom and I've called out for her. Begging for her help. For her love. For some sort of reassurance that everything is going to be ok. That I'm going to be ok. That I am ok. Of course, it doesn't happen and it only serves to hurt me in the process.

When I got married, I really wanted the whole experience. The wedding, the picking out dresses, the planning, the dreaming, the hoping. But it didn't happen. My mother's main concern when it came to my wedding was how she felt about it. After about the fifth conversation with her about how excited she was to take my nieces shopping for dresses for my wedding, I gave up. We couldn't afford a wedding and he was getting deployed. My husband and I got married at the courthouse. Neither one of my parents were invited.

Soon after we were married, I got pregnant. Not planned but I was married this time. I had a masters degree. I had a home. My husband was going to be on a yearlong deployment and here we were newlywed and expecting a baby. As an expectant, I longed for my mom to be there with me. To ease my anxiety, to hold my hand, to experience the pregnancy with me since my husband wouldn't be able to. Despite the fact her response to my news, "Are you stupid?" I still hoped that she would come around and want to be apart of the experience. But her idea of being involved was based more on what was convenient for her than anything else. My son was born via c-section after a failed induction because I developed pre-eclampsia at 37 weeks. Not terribly uncommon but he was early and my husband wasn't scheduled to come home on leave for another week. It was a situation that would have been difficult under the very best circumstances made more difficult because I just wanted my mom to be a mom and she couldn't or wouldn't do it. So I made up my mine to let her go again. Start the process of mourning mom all over again.

I'm like the dog that gets kicked and keeps coming back for more so powerful is my need or desire to be mothered. 

As my son has grown and especially when I had my daughter, the hurt of not having a mother has taken a new shape. The hurt is still there, the longing, the desire to share my experiences with someone who should be able to empathize or at least offer a kind word but also the realization that I could never do to my kids what my mother has done to me. I would never ever let me children feel like they were nothing, or that they were in the way, or that they weren't wanted. I love my children. My love for my children is fierce. They are very loved, very wanted, very special and I make sure that they know that. Part of my job as a mother is to protect my children from harm and now that includes making sure that my mother doesn't have the ability to them to do to them what she's done to me and that they are not made to witness the kind of verbal abuse that I've been subjected to my whole life. I used to think that it was important for my kids to have grandparents in their lives. My husband's family is just as screwed up as mine and his parents have no relationship with my kids so I figured my parents could fit the bill. I would let them be the grandparents. I have been willing to tolerate my mom's disapproval and hatred of me because she was good to my kids. She seemed to make them happy. But this is no longer the case.

A part of me feels guilty, like I'm robbing my children of something. And I guess, in a way, I am. They won't have a close relationship with any of their grandparents despite the fact that they are all still alive and able bodied. Grandparenting, like parenting, is a privilege. And when a privilege is abused, it should be taken away. As a parent, it's my responsibility to make that call. In doing so, I will be forced to mourn mom in a way that's permanent and hopefully after all of this time will finally lead to some real closure. My desire to protect my children outweighs my desire to have a mom.  For them I will be a mom. The kind of mom that they need. For them, I will let her go. I will let her go totally and completely and finally.