Just Beth

My mother died two weeks after my ninth birthday.

If you’ve been reading my blog you might be confused.  Shit, if you know me in real life you might be a little perplexed.  I talk about my mom all the time.  In fact, she and my brother just visited not long ago.

Confused?  Yeah, me too.

See, my dad – that handsome young man in the picture to my left – and my mom married and had a son.  Then, as happens, their marriage began to deteriorate.  It was during the dissolution of their marriage that my mom became pregnant with me. It was probably not the best environment to bring a child into, but hey, I’m glad they did, you know?  I’m sure you are, too… because now YOU get ME!!

Ha ha.

My dad remarried when I was eighteen months old, and this is the woman who raised me after my mom died.  She’s not really into my whole ‘blogging’ thing, so this is the picture you get.  We call her ‘Masue’.

I have no memory of my parents ever being together.  In fact, the only time I remember my parents being in the same room together was at my mothers’ funeral.

This is the woman who nursed me through mononucleosis in the third grade.  This is the woman who showed me how to be a good mother; this woman is the voice in my head who nags me about my laundry and picking up my room and eating right and not watching too much t.v., and… you get the picture, don’t you?  She’s my mother.  My mom.

It wasn’t always this easy, putting my two mothers together.  After my mom died, all I wanted was for Masue to think of me as her own daughter.  I didn’t realize that she already did… I looked for the different ways that she treated my (half) brother and sister, her biological children.  I looked for them and so I found them, and I let that mold me into a person who always looked for the negative pieces of herself, for the ‘reason’ I felt unacceptable.

Then I almost lost her, too.  This time instead of to illness it was to pride and misunderstanding.  I moved from Los Angeles to the Pacific Northwest nearly five years ago and spent the better part of a year alone, pregnant, and thinking.  I thought about letting the distance between the two of us continue until it was complete; I thought about confronting her with the old ‘you never loved me’ argument; I thought about how little I wanted to fight with her, and how much I wanted her to accept me as I was.  I thought and I watched What Not To Wear and the Dog Whisperer and I thought about the baby I was carrying, my own daughter, and about how much I simply wanted my mom.

I finally figured it out, though.  I figured out that no matter what, no matter if Masue wanted me to be or not, I *AM* her daughter.  There’s nothing either one of us can do about it.   She’s my mom and I love her, and the fighting we were doing, the distance between us was something that most mothers and daughters go through.  Once I realized that, that mothers and daughters fight and disagree and argue and still love each other, I was able to let so much go.  I let the anxiety about whether or not she loved me just like my siblings go.  I let the fear that I wasn’t ever going to be accepted by her family go.  I let the fact that she was so pissed and hurt by me that she might never be able to get over it go, and I reinserted myself into her life.  I hope she doesn’t mind. 

And I’m still my mothers’ daughter.  I have her brown eyes, her big boobs, her love of laughter and drink and family.  I remember her and I love her, and I don’t have to feel guilty about loving and being Masue’s daughter as well.  I get to have both of them, and that makes me very, very lucky.