Underneath the mask

We all wear masks.  Mine comes complete with a red lipstick smile and aviator sunglasses.  I had to remember to pick them up on the way out of the house.  My eyes had sprung a leak you see.  It is Boxing Day and if I lived in England, where my other half is from, I would not have to get up in the dark and get dressed to go to work.  It was dark when I got up but I slept long enough for it to be light when I actually left the house.  I was late leaving. 

I had stood before the mirror the first time my sleep broke.  I had glanced at the clock on my way back to bed to make sure I had enough time to sleep.  It was just a little after 3 am.  I could still get a good 3 hours of sleep.  So I went back to bed.  My alarm hadn’t gone off.  My cell phone had failed to charge and the battery was dead.  His went off and he woke up.  Thankfully, he woke me up too. 

I did my hair, washed my face, and put my eyes in.  I looked passable, maybe even human.  The white clown make up was off as was my painted smile.  I caught a glimpse of it lurking there, behind my eyes.  But I turned away, satisfied with my mask firmly in place, ready to face the day.  That’s when my eyes started leaking.  Drop by drop, my eyes began to rain, tiny little streams, leaving a streak across my cheeks, flowing steadily.

 

I felt the wave of grief as it ebbed and flowed, rising around me, crashing over me, over and over again.  I had spent so much of my time and energy to ensure that this year was distinctly different than any that had come before.  I had taken every precaution to surround myself with the love and laughter of family and friends.  I had tried so hard to find just the right gift.  But all had been in vain. 

Her birthday came and went.  Christmas Eve became Christmas morning.  I could barely move.  I told myself it was expected, after all I had all of 3 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours.  Kids were cranky and fought to play with toys that belong to the other, not their own.  I didn’t participate in the tree massacre.  What would be the point?  It would only remind me that there was nothing under the tree for me.  

It was her Christmas tree, hers to fill.  I filled it with presents for her grandson.  After all Christmas is for children who can still experience the anticipation of joy that a brightly wrapped gift brings.  I had filled the bottom of her tree with gifts, chosen with care for the recipient.  It was such a pleasure to pull out a gift, large or small, and just see the surprise on the receiver’s face.  I realize that I am like my mother in that my pleasure is giving gifts more than in receiving.  

The first time I bought my mother a present for her birthday, I was 18 or 19, I think.  I don’t remember exactly.  My dad always bought the presents for her and put our names on it.  I had looked high and low and found nothing that would do.  My mother was a re-gifter.  If it didn’t suit her, she’d turn around and gift it to someone else.  It’s not a bad practice as my mother always got a lot of nice things.  I actually helped her re-gift a lot of her gifts.  I was determined that she wasn’t going to re-gift anything I gave her.  I think that was the year I discovered the Body Shop.  I found out that they actually mixed fragrant oils into their unscented lotions.  So I bought my mom a lotion and had them mix sandalwood oil into the lotion.  She opened it and didn’t once ask me why I wasted money to buy her a present.  She would always tell me when she was out of her lotion and I’d always pick up a new one for her up until I stopped going to that store.  By then she and I had stopped using their products already.

It’s funny the things you notice when someone is gone from your life for good.  I introduced my mom to Oil of Olay face cream.  We used the same one.  I changed it to Avon Anew when I started selling Avon and again, I introduced her to the Anew face cream and she changed to that.  When I first started cleaning out her medicine cabinet after moving into her house, I opened her Avon face cream.  It was done.  If she had lived, I know she would have told me to get her another one.  I was relieved.  Then I found her Oil of Olay face cream and started I started using that instead.  

I think in some ways, I’m luckier than my brother and father.  She just left them and all they have are the memories.  Eventually they will fade.  But when I cook, I get to smell the food as its cooking, something I picked up from her.  She pointed out to me that the smell of Indian spices change while they are cooking and you can tell when the spices are ready just by smelling them.  I told her that if you boil cloves in water after cooking, it removes the pungent smell of onions that cling to clothes like bad body odor.  Everyone who has ever grown up in an Indian household knows what I mean.

She made my clothes for as long as I can remember.  She loved to sew.  She got so mad at me when I got rid of all my clothes as a teenager.  I had no choice.  They were clothes for a girl and I was halfway to becoming a woman.  In plain English, they were not accommodating my growing curves.  So she stopped sewing me clothes and started buying clothes for me.  Somewhere along the course of my dramatic teenage years, my mother let me grow up from her little girl into a woman.  We fought when I became a mother but then I think maybe she just didn’t believe I could be as good a mother as I needed to be.  But before she left me, she told me she wasn’t worried about me anymore.  She had seen I had changed.

 

Once when I came to see her in her hospital room, I had tried to cheer her up, make her laugh.  So I said to her that it could go one of two ways.  She could either see her mother again or be stuck with me.  She said she had her ma already.  I was her mother here.  In that moment nothing else mattered, not the drama, the misunderstandings, none of it.  Funny, how easy forgiveness is.  I told her I shouldn’t have told her the things I said to her on the last occasion when we had our ugliest fight.  I didn’t mean any of the things I said, not really.  All she said was, I know.  I told her I was sorry.  She said I forgave you already, as if I should have known.  I didn’t care in that moment that this woman had disappointed me in more ways than I cared to admit.  None of that crap mattered, not really. 

In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul talks about love.  Oh how, every romantic loves that chapter.  He starts off saying that you can speak with tongues of men and angels, have prophetic powers, have incredibly strong faith, give to charity, live a sacrificial life, but if you don’t have love, you have nothing.  No one really knows how much my mother’s death cost me.  Financially, it cost me.  Mentally, it cost me.  Physically, it cost me.  Those are the usual costs most people understand.  No one saw the strain on my husband or children.  No one saw what they sacrificed for me.  But in the end, the price of love was worth it.  I can look back on those 2 and a-half months and know that I didn’t squander my time with her.  She knew how much I loved her.  It was the only gift I had left to give her.  

In return, she left me a legacy of love.  She showed me who I am.  Maybe she had failed to instill in me self-confidence because we communicated using different languages.  I don’t mean that literally but figuratively.  Often, we can say something but if we don’t take into account how the other person will hear it, we fail to effectively communicate our true meaning.  This is where most discord comes from.  My mother made a point to call me every day and ask how my kids were doing.  She never asked me how I was but neither she ever fail to tell me she loved me.  She had high, exacting expectations from me, but if I shared something with her and it was better, she always listened, even if she never gave me credit for introducing the idea.  

She never complimented my ability to artistically arrange things but she always told me arrange things before her guests showed up.  Since she left, I had a few opportunities to arrange dinner tables.  My efforts were appreciated and admired and the sentiments were communicated to me.  I realized now, that my fastidious mother let me arrange a lot of things in her life that she would never allow anyone to do.  She already knew this.  Maybe it’s time, I accept what she knew about me as facts too.  Somewhere, deep in my brain is the knowledge, it’s time I use what I already know.  She said those words to me in a letter she wrote over 13 years ago.  Maybe it’s time to trust those words and trust her faith in me.  I have a big job to do if I’m going to get a chance to move on with my life.

This is my new normal.  Behind the mask, behind the clown make-up and pasted on smile is a woman waiting to be born.  The birth pains of grief are strong and her time is at hand.  But we will get through this, she and I and when she is born, I will embrace her.  My mother will never see her but I think maybe, in those last few months I spent with her, she saw a glimpse of her.  That was her gift to me, her love.  I know now that I am strong enough to love and not ever be afraid of the pain that comes with loving unconditionally.  My one regret will be that I will never get to share any of what’s yet to come with her.  That is the hardest thing to bear.  I never thought of my mother as my best friend.  But she always did see my best parts even while loving the worst of me. 

Happy Birthday Mother

I love birthdays but then who doesn’t?  I’ve always loved my birthdays as they were always large affairs.  I spent a few hours every year surrounded by people who loved and adored me.  As I got older, I realized I was very naive.  My birthdays were memorable because of my mother.   I didn’t realize it until my 33^rd birthday.  I spent that birthday, writing in a journal and ranting at God because the doctor used the word “cancer” in the same sentence he had used to refer to my mother.  Cancer is something that happened to other people.  Not my mother.  

If she was scared, she never said.  If she was worried about the outcome, she never let it show.  I hated the fact that I was spending my birthday sitting in a hospital room with my mom.  When I got to her room that day, she told me happy birthday.  In that moment I realized the significance of birthdays.  A woman is first a daughter but if she’s lucky she becomes a mother and then maybe even a grandmother.  My son was two years almost and in that moment I realized that a birthday connects two people, the child who is born and the woman who births her.  

I wasn’t sure how I would manage this day.  It surprised me.  I got a card from a dear friend who reminded me that I am the best parts of my mother.  It was better than I would have hoped and I like to think that if she is indeed looking down from heaven she would approve.  We are fractured but healing will come with time.  I believe this now.  If you had asked me a week ago, I would not have had the faith.  

As I sit here writing this, I’m realizing that this is my new normal.  This year is coming to a close.  I spent rang in 2014 with my best friend.  I remember calling my mother and wishing her a Happy New Year.  I saw her in passing when I came back from Brooklyn.  I could regret it, but the writer in me sees only the foreshadowing of the events that transpired.  I will never share any birthdays with her.  There will never be any more new years for either one of us.  

Yet, I’m ok with that.  In part because I have to be, but in truth because as much as I miss her, she will always be an intricate part of me.  The beauty is slowly beginning to emerge from the ashes. 

....this is my Christmas wish...

Upon much reflection I must admit, “[i]t is well with my soul”.  I have cried and grieved much, perhaps far more than I would like.  I cry and grieve still.  Yet life move forwards.  As the day of my mother’s birth approaches, two days before Christmas in fact, my thoughts turn more and more towards that babe born in a manger over 2,000 years ago.  I can’t escape this emptiness within my heart, the ache deep in my soul.  I am broken.  Permanently.  There is no quick fix or even a lengthy recovery from this.  Her material possessions are as cold as the grave I will never visit.  Her warmth is gone as is the tender care with which she nurtured all things, living and non-living.  

On this day, when despair would devour me whole, I find myself listening to Horatio Spafford’s hymn “It Is Well With My Soul”.  I know the song and the story of its composition well but I never paused to dwell on the lyrics before.  I was hoping to gain comfort form the following words:

“When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say
It is well, it is well, with my soul.”

Instead, I found a promise….

“Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”

I have been attacked to my core this past week from those closest to me.  I don’t say this as a means of complaint against anyone.  Rather, I say this with the realization that we don’t have defenses against those we love the most.  We can guard our hearts, but not against those we love.  It's not possible.  That is how the enemy will come, as a slithering serpent into our very garden of Eden, to break, to steal, to destroy, until we have nothing left.  The last few weeks have been filled with anger, pain, and a lot of hurt.  I have spent two week amidst harsh economic conditions and the end just doesn’t seem in sight.  Then I really heard the words to the song.  

Christ has regarded that I would be here, right now, and He has shed His blood for my soul!  In the midst of this raging storm in my life, my emotions, my thoughts, my peace are all under attack, but Christ knew this.  He has shed His blood for MY soul.  Not in part, by in whole.  How profound is that thought, not only the sin that I committed yesterday but the one I have yet to commit.  I am imperfect.  He is perfect.  I will respond in a way that is less than perfect.  To err is human as the poet said.  I will err over and over and over again.  Yet, 2,000 years ago before He appeared in the manger, He chose to regard my helpless estate and shed His blood for my soul.  Not in part, but in whole, until I draw my last breath.  It humbled me unlike anything else has ever done in my life.  If I hadn’t done this before, when I gave my life to him all those years ago, I do so now and humble myself to Him and offer my complete and total surrender.  

“And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend
Even so, it is well, with my soul.”

I thought of my mother and those last few weeks when she came home.  We are human and parting for us is sorrowful at the best of times.  We hold each other up the best that we can.  We react, we ache, we hurt, we mourn, we grieve, and we do whatever we have to do to go through the motions of living because we are still here on this earth.   Our life continues on.  Time moves on.  

In those last few weeks, though I didn’t know it then and wouldn’t for a good while, the doorway to heaven was open.  She wasn’t waiting to go, with her bags all packed.  No, she was waiting for her Jesus to come and get her.  The presence of God grew stronger as the day for her departure came nearer.  Only God knows the hour when He will come.  For those of us who were fortunate to be able to visit with her, we got to experience that awesome presence of God.  When I arrived at the house after her departure, the presence was gone.  The Lord of hosts had descended in the night while we slept and as quietly as the babe was born in the manger amidst Mary’s agony and Joseph’s concerned helplessness, He took my mother’s hand and she left with Him.  She was ready.  Are we?

As we go through the last minute checks on the gifts and the parties, pause for a moment and dwell on that night.  A mother close to her time.  A world in turmoil.  Labor pains begin and there is no room at the inn.  A husband, desperately concerned for his wife and the well-being of the child she’s about to bring into this world.  Into this scene came the Son of God, Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, the Messiah the world was waiting for.  He regarded our helpless, hopeless estate and He came into this world still knowing, He would die on that cross for our souls!  

I hope this Christmas season, you can reflect on your circumstances and know that all is well with your soul because that babe, born in the manger at Bethlehem died for your soul.  Our sins, not in part, but in whole was nailed to the cross.  So whoever you are, wherever you are, you don’t have to carry whatever you are carrying.  Take the gift that has been given to you.  Be free and let it be well with your soul.