Letting Go

I let go last night.

I cried and cried and cried.

Grieving one loss melted into the bigger loss.

I miss my mom.

I miss the part of her who loved me regardless of what I said, who kept me as her daughter even when the temptation was to cut me out.

She couldn’t.

For all the people around her who thought they knew her, I can only smile and know, they did not. They only knew the mask, a gilded surface of who she was. I knew all of her. She trusted me. I knew her fears, her insecurities, her pain. I held her through them so many times. She would tell me how she felt about people. The one’s who used her and why she let them. The few she truly loved and her joy about them.

My sister in law spoke to me, just before my mother’s death, about how surprised she was at my mother’s insecurities. She’s frightened, she told me. Just a little girl.

I knew. I’ve always known. It was a vulnerability she showed me from the time I was very young that hooked me in, drew me near. I couldn’t stand to see her pain. Only in the last few years did I learn it was the roses in the cycle that would eventually turn to pain before coming back as roses again.

She’s gone. She’s never going to be on the other end of the phone to laugh with about Jake’s latest antics. She’s never going to ask me what I’m serving for a party and what flowers I would put out. She’s never going to yell about the horrible Republicans and how the world was going to hell in a hand basket because of them. She’s never going to sit with my kids in her lap and read them a story.

She’ll never sit with me again and tell me the real story. How she really felt. Let me in behind the mask she wore so tightly, sharing her secrets, her true self.

A friend said to me at the funeral service last week, it’s time to let go.

I let go last night.

She’s gone. My grief is intense. It’s not about fighting anymore.

I miss my mom.