Woman in the Mirror

This is a good day. My article on my relationship with my mother just got published in the local monthly paper. Hope you like it.

WOMAN IN THE MIRROR

My mother died two years ago. She was 90 years old and had the good fortune to have an active body and mind until the last year of her life. Her amazing lungs survived the assault of seventy years of smoking but finally succumbed to unforgiving lung cancer. She might have lived to be a hundred.

For almost half my life I’ve had mixed feelings about my mother. Although I loved her, I felt she had not been the kind of mother I deserved. Her mothering tended to swing between neglect and loving nurture. She was a beautiful woman, a redhead who looked like the old-time movie star Susan Hayward. In addition, she charmed almost everyone she met. When I was five years old, she divorced my father and was subsequently wined and dined by hopeful suitors for several years. During this time, she often left me home, feeling deserted and forlorn, with my grandmother All in all she married four times.

As a young child I loved her blindly. But when I reached puberty, my new found ability to judge and assess resulted in countless she didn’t, she should have, and why didn’t shes.

Over the years, my fury grew like a well fertilized plant. Although she bought me a life-saver in the form of a little horse named Stardust, it made no difference. During my teen years, she even devoted herself to following me to horseshows, where I won many trophies and ribbons. But it was too late. The fires of my anger had spread and burned into my consciousness like the cancer in her lungs. In following decades, I unburdened myself to more than a few therapists who listened in quiet support, sustaining my claims of injustice.

Growing up, I looked very much like my father, a handsome dark-haired man with deep brown eyes. His looks were the complete opposite of my mother. And as the absent parent, my visits with him were filled with attention and fun, unhindered by the snags of daily living.

My resentment towards my mother caused me to carefully examine and savor every one of my photographs that echoed my father’s features. My hair was almost black and my skin tanned easily to a dark brown bronze. The last thing in the world I wanted was to look like my mother, a woman who couldn’t get a tan if she lay on the Healdsburg beach for a week.

I enjoyed my bittersweet resentment towards my mother until my late thirties. At that time I became deeply depressed and unable to take care of myself. My father was long deceased and she was the only parent I had. Given no other choice, I crawled home to mother.

As I lay on my mother’s couch bemoaning my life through the dark veil of depression, I watched the woman I had rejected doing everything she could to comfort me. Yes, she still didn’t do the best job taking care of me. But I could see how hard she must have tried when I was a child. Imperfect but loving. From the vantage point of lying flat on my back, I forgave my mother. Forever. Months later, after I recovered from my depression, I found that my mother had become a great friend and companion. In fact, she became my best friend and throughout the remaining years of her life, we enjoyed many good times together.

In my fifties, a strange thing happened. The image of my father was gradually fading from the mirror. Instead, the lines in my face drew in a person I had never wanted to resemble, my mother. Not only did I begin to look like her, I started noticing the many ways we were alike. As a mother, I too tried my best, but shared some of her failings. During my early adulthood, I also got caught up in my own life and didn’t give my daughter as much attention as she needed and deserved. On the positive side, I also found that my mother and I shared many of the same interests and values.

Now, after my mother’s passing, I know I will never talk with her again or enjoy her company. But as I approach seventy, the lines in my face have deepened and have brought into clearer focus the woman I see in the mirror. It is uncanny but there in the mirror is my lost mother and I am glad to see her. This apparition is not my imagination for when meeting people who knew my mother, they often react in shock. “You look just like your mother!”