Lipstick Stains on Your Pillow

My mom died when I was 13 years old. And I amazed how my relationship with her continues to grow and change.

After she committed suicide I distanced myself from her in my heart. She was not a memory but a source of living pain. How she could have let her schizophrenia and addiction get so out of control? I could not understand.

I wanted to understand and tried to understand. I just could not.

I was too young to understand that it was not her fault. After all, I thought she was the strongest woman in the world. How could she let this happen?

She had been in and out of addiction and mental health treatment centers for months while I was passed around in foster homes. Her need for help and my need for help were a source of embarrassment for me. I used make jokes to anyone who knew where she was about coo-coo farms and loony bins. But mostly I said nothing at all.

When she died I said even less. The embarrassment instantly subsided and the pain took over. For years. I was hard as cement. My only passing thoughts of my mom were those that were triggered by bad memories. Memories of abuse. Her deeply sadistic ways of controlling me as a child. Luckily for me, time does heal and i become softer with each year.

She was 39 when she died. I remember when I reached that landmark year. Part of me wondered what a woman is supposed to look like or do after 39? I am still figuring it out. But I have new perspective for my dear mum. By my age my mother had four children. She had been married four times. She had spent her years juggling all of that and her illness and addiction. Damn.

And so our relationship continues to grow, even though she is no longer here.

A few years ago I was roaming around in a high-end furniture shop in New York City. Furniture is interesting to me because my mom used to build and rebuild furniture for a living. She was a self-taught upholsterer. But on this day I had a sudden rush, a realization, and a wash of memories of my mom.

I was just standing in front of a piece of furniture. Something hand stitched by an artist with a price tag in the tens of thousands of dollars. I thought back to the furniture my mother used to make.

My mom got to the point where she was building the frames and all by hand. I would watch her buy raw materials like wood, foam, fabric, thread and see her craft a couch. I would think it was magic if I did not see it with my own eyes.

In this high end shop I looked at the expensive couch in front of me and realized my mother could do anything I saw in that store and do it better. She never had a chance.

She was a highly creative artist. She was incredible.

And so i continue to stumble upon gifts she gave me. Like my sewing machine. She did not give it to me, but the day I got it I was really excited to learn how to use it. The funny thing was – the very first moment I sat down in front of it, I threaded the needle and just started sewing. Little did I know I had spent so many years with my mom as she used her industrial sewing machine that I already knew how to sew. It was simply in me. A gift from my mom.

She also loved music. She wrote poems.

I think the most surprising gift was the day my brother (another gift from my mom) hand delivered a newspaper clipping for me. It was something his grandmother had saved for nearly 30 years. All yellowed. It was a poem my mother had written and published in the local newspaper. She published it as a thank you to the small Minnesota town that had given her support while I was in the hospital for a year, surviving my many surgeries to correct my birth defects. It was a poem about me.

Golden Girl
She’s watching all that you say and do
‘weighing, surveying the world and you…
and absorbing more than you might surmise…
My Golden Girl with the searching eyes.

The cocoon of childhood protects her still…
With dreams to which she retreats at will…
But has she the treasures to take their place
when tomorrow’s world is hers to face?

Give her the gift with the lift of wings…
….teach her…
the love of beautiful things.

I think her wish came true. I see beauty every where I turn. Thank you mom.