It was Mother’s Day in 2002 when I called home and Mom wasn’t there. Dad said she took my little sister and left. “What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely confused.
He told me her clothes were gone. He didn’t know where she went.
I was living in Baltimore, Maryland, attending University of Maryland Baltimore County, and my parents were in the process of selling our house in New Jersey and moving to Florida. Mom, I learned later, moved into a temporary shelter for abused women. How insulting. She was never abused; she felt emotionally neglected, but she also failed to communicate that effectively.
Our relationship remains fraught as waves of anger rise and crash within me like seasons.
Winter numbs the Christmas slash wounds before spring warms the fertile ground. Like mosquitoes breeding in standing water, I await a text or a call or even a card in the mail from Mom.
By mid-May I’m itching uncontrollably from biting thoughts that I’m a terrible Mom, that I am an unstable, moody momster more than a guiding and positive presence in my children’s lives.
I’m trying to be the best Mom I can be while juggling end-of-the-school-year responsibilities, awards nights, orchestra and chorus performances. Somewhere in the sticky center of May comes Mother’s Day.
The holiday of honoring our maternal creators comes roughly between Christmas and my mom’s September birthday.
This year, Mom wasn’t the only ghost leaving me haunted and hurting.
This year, Mother’s Day found me a premenstrual, perimenopausal woman fighting the pull of the full flower moon on the planet’s oceans and the tides of my emotions. My fingers whipped the iPhone keys like waves smashing onto the cold, wet, sand-packed shore.
When mother and I texted last October she was too sick to visit for my birthday. I didn’t mind.
On December 19, 2024, she texted and asked whether I had time to talk.
“I’m working,” I wrote to avoid intonation. I would only show typeface.
I offered to host Mom and my brother for Christmas, but she said was too sick to make the two-hour trip. She complained about sciatica and TMJ, saying she had been depressed.
“I’m sorry,” I offered.
We exchanged “I love yous” and she apologized if she “ever hurt me.”
“It’s okay,” I assured her without forgiving her. “Every day is a new day.”
“Not if I don’t have you,” she texted.
I waited months for another text because, you know, if she couldn’t live without me, how was she not dead?
In early February, I texted to ask her to donate to the kids’ school fundraiser. The request was more of a test.
“I just got donating to the Red Cross,” she typed, with autocorrect likely squeezing the words done and donating into one word.
She told me she could send $15, but then said she didn’t know how to use electronic transfer.
“I can mail a check,” she must have been bluffing, but I didn’t call it.
“That’s okay,” I typed.
I festered with her December “not if I don’t have you” text until Mother’s Day 2025. Then, I replied to the comment and began cursing her out.
My months of controlled madness ruptured, and I lashed out with sentences. My messages spattered like blood from whipped skin onto her smartphone screen.
“Don’t fucking call me,” I texted.
Then, I turned my desperate need for attention on a friend who shut me out of social media updates like a college roommate hanging a tie on the door as it slams.
“This is cruel,” I complained in messenger, followed by a flood of pathetic protestations and supplications for friendly life updates.
Later, I unsent most of the scrolling list of unread messages.
My stomach churned as my husband’s warm chest and soft T-shirt absorbed my tears so I could sleep again.
After Mother’s Day, on June 1, hurricane season begins. It peaks in mid-September, around my mom’s birthday.