A Mother’s Day Tribute
Dressing for a long day of Zoom calls with my coaching clients, there was a chill in the air, so I reached for a scarf in my closet. Rifling through the drawer, I noticed a sealed plastic bag. Unzipping it, a scarf I’d brought my mother from a trip to Cambodia ten years ago fell gently in my hands. As I wrapped the soft, robin’s egg blue silk scarf around my neck, her scent came wafting back through the remnants of her Givenchy Amarige perfume still lingering in the bag.
Winter and spring are the hardest seasons for me every year since my mother died five years ago. Between her death date, her birth date, Easter, and Mother’s Day, I am starkly reminded of just how much I miss the mother she became to me in the twilight of her life.
Donna and Mom At Restaurant
Mama died unexpectedly two weeks before her eighty-eighth birthday, the day after Valentine’s Day. If her soul had a choice as to when she departed this earth, her timing was perfect, as she would never have wanted us to be sad as we remembered her departure on the day that we honor love. Her three-day exit from a bleeding ulcer was protracted, much to the dismay of the doctors and staff in the ICU. Even though most of her organs had already shut down, her strong heart wouldn’t stop beating. I believe that’s because it opened so wide in the last two years of her life to the power of unconditional love.
Mama and I had a challenging relationship for most of my life. As a child, I was precocious, completely fearless, a die-hard tomboy, and an eclectic spiritual seeker forever curious about the world. My mother was prim and proper. A Fox News-loving Southern Baptist with an air of Southern gentility, she spent her entire life in Texas until her final months when my wife and I moved her to California as her dementia progressed.
Mama’s two favorite expressions I remember her saying often while growing up were, “Bless her heart” and “That’s not very ladylike.” The more I became my own person and not the person she wanted me to be, the harder she clamped down. The most common word she uttered in the last months of her life was, “Wow!” like a child agape in wonder as she explored an entirely different world than the one she’d known before.
One of my earliest memories as an eight-year-old was standing at my bedroom window talking to God late one night. At the time, I believed he lived in a mansion somewhere on the moon, so on the nights the moon was out, he was easy to talk to. “God,” I said, with great conviction, staring at the pink blood moon, “Why am I here in this town? I don’t think these are my real parents. Maybe you made a mistake.”
Growing up in the panhandle of West Texas, the more Mama attempted to control me, the more I rebelled. My identity was formed in direct opposition to her vision of who she wanted me to be, so as soon as I graduated from college in San Antonio, I fled to Florida to be near my fiancé, who I broke up with a couple of years before meeting with my first female partner.
Mama convinced herself that my partner was my long-term “roommate” because considering the possibility she had two LGBTQ children was too much to bear. My brother had come out in his early twenties, so in order to protect her illusion that she hadn’t completely failed as a mother, l dove deeper into my closet, moving with my partner to California a few years later for a job promotion.
I was thirty years old when I finally found the courage to come out to Mama after my partner had met someone else and moved out. I was devastated by the loss of our relationship, even though, in my heart, I knew we both needed to move on. A few months later, I met my wife and soulmate, Julie, with whom I’ve shared my life for thirty-two years.
Julie and I seriously considered foster adopting a five-year-old boy when I was in my late thirties. When I shared the news with Mama over a catfish lunch on a visit to Texas one summer, she exclaimed, “You gave up the right to be a parent the moment you decided to be gay.” I was both furious and crushed at her response and refused to speak to her for more than a month, but still, the seeds of her homophobia took deeper roots in the tender shoots of my heart, so we never proceeded with adoption.
In her late seventies, while sitting in her Cadillac one day after a shopping trip, Mama pulled the car into the parking space, grabbed my hand, looked me straight between the eyes and said, “You know the biggest regret of my life?” Sitting dumbfounded in the passenger seat since we’d both learned a long time before that it was best for us to only engage in superficial discussions, I replied, “No. What is it, Mama?” Tears streaming down her face in the 105-degree Dallas heat, she replied, “That I tried to kill your spirit when you were a child.”
Never in a million years would I have guessed I’d ever hear those words from my mother. I gathered my wits, squeezed her hand, dried her tears with my palm and said, “Thank you for telling me that, Mama. You’ll never know how much that means to me to hear you say that. I know you did the best you knew to do at the time, and I forgive you.” That was our moment of détente when I knew in my heart that my deepest desire to have the kind of relationship I’d always wanted with my mother might actually be possible, following a lifetime of doubt.
Two years later, following my stepfather’s death, Mama was turning eighty. My brother and I decided to throw a party at her church for all her friends and a dinner party afterward for our large Irish clan at her house. A couple of weeks before I left to fly to Texas for her birthday celebration, Mama asked me if my brother and I would either leave our spouses behind or if they would come with us to the party at church, if we’d leave our wedding rings at home. Once again, I was gutted but soldiered on out of duty.
That evening, after everyone left, as Mama and I were washing dishes, she threw her arms around me, pulled me close and said, “Honey, you kids made this such a special day for me. How can I ever thank you.” As I recoiled from her embrace, every tear I had stored in my body was unleashed.
“You have broken my heart,” I sobbed. “This day, like everything else in my life, has been about you. Again, you’ve asked me to be someone that I am not. You made it clear the person I love the most in my life wasn’t welcomed here unless we pretended she was my roommate. I just can’t do this anymore. I love you, and I will always be there to take care of you because you’re my mother, but I am no longer willing to be disrespected by you anymore, and I refuse to have my relationship with Julie be negated.”
It was the most honest I’d ever been with my mother in my entire life, as I’d always feared, like a porcelain doll, she would break if I really said what I was feeling. Mama wept and finally apologized, telling me she never wanted to hurt me, then finally admitted how hurtful her actions had been. I was reminded of all the fits and starts we’d had over the course of our relationship. I’d think we’d made progress, then she’d say something that hurt me, and I’d distance myself from disappointment, a pattern we’d maintained for more than fifty years. And yet, underneath it all, there was a deep well of love we just never seemed to be able to sustain.
When she was eighty-five, Julie and I moved Mama to a senior living facility near our home in Northern California, where she spent the final twenty-seven months of her life, a time that proved pivotal to our healing. During those months, her heart opened wider, and her judgments and criticisms of me ceased. She was exposed to people and places she’d never experienced before.
Julie helped me care for her, and Mama grew to love her as a daughter. I made the commitment when she moved to be near us to keep my heart open and to take advantage of whatever time we had left, but in the beginning, that commitment was mostly out of duty. Every time I’d drop off groceries or drive Mama back to her apartment from our house, she’d call me back to the door, ask if she could hug me “one more time,” and then she’d say, “I couldn’t ask for a better daughter. Thank you for taking such good care of me.”
Three weeks before she died, while having our regular Friday night dinners at our house one night with Julie and me, Mama said, “I’m so thankful my two children found such wonderful spouses to spend your lives with. I don’t think either one of you could have made a better choice.” Again, I was dumbfounded.
At the end of her life, Mama became the mother I’d always longed for. She stopped being critical of me and started being complimentary. Her kindness towards me, which was her essence, was hidden for years by her strict cultural norms and religious beliefs but blossomed and grew. We both stopped trying to make the other person who we wanted each other to be and accepted one another for who we were, very different people with diverse beliefs and worldviews, yet deeply connected through the deep bond of love we shared.
In those final months, we shared together, my sense of duty toward my mother transformed into devotion, as did hers for me.
When Mama was on this earth, I was her teacher and protector, and now that she’s on the other side, she’s become mine. Even though I miss the mother she was to me at the end of her life every single day, I sense she’s always with me, whispering in my ear when I need encouragement and reminding me her spirit is still present as the red-tailed hawk circles gently overhead. Five years later, she continues to remind me through the signs and symbols she sends of her continued presence as I move forward in my life without her, just like today, as I remember her loving embrace through the scent of her soft silk scarf.
About the author: Donna Stoneham is the author of a new book titled, Catch Me When I Fall: Poems of Mother Loss and Healing (May 9, 2023). She is an executive coach, team facilitator, and former hospice chaplain who lives with her wife and rescue dogs in Point Richmond, California. Her last book, The Thriver’s Edge: Seven Keys to Transform the Way You Live, Love, and Lead, was a USA Best Book Award, a National Indie Excellence Book Award, and an International Book Awards finalist. Her work has been featured in the Wall St. Journal, Woman’s Day, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and on TV, radio, and podcasts. When she’s not coaching or writing, you’ll find her playing with her new puppy, watching British television, communing with spirit and nature in a kayak, or hiking by the shore.
