How does one begin writing truthfully about someone as elusive as a mother? When you are grieving a living mother — one who is alive, but emotionally and parentally absent — translating that relationship into honest words can feel like an impossible task.
When I think of the one who birthed me, I think of a young woman with long, chestnut hair, wearing a white dress with capped sleeves. She’s in a green field with a handsome, ponytailed man who holds a baby of white peach fuzz.
This woman is both my creator and a complete stranger: that mom — to me, that baby. When I think of the mother I experienced, I’m spiraled back in time, plopped inside a bare-bones bedroom, where I lay, subdued, atop her bloodstains. This is a piece of that story.
One Mother, One Daughter
I am my mother’s only child. From the age of three, when my father died and my mother moved out of her own mother’s house, it was always just the two of us, contained within the plaster walls of whatever apartment she rented at the time.
We moved into the Boulder Springs apartment when I was in the eighth grade, and it would be the last place we lived together. I loved that the units had stairs. Stairs, to me, distinguished Boulder Springs from any other place I’d lived so far. This wasn’t another destitute apartment. This was a multilevel town house.
Though it remained unfurnished for months, I felt legitimized simply by staying somewhere with indoor stairs — as if this small ascent meant I was a normal American girl at last.
Boulder Springs
This new neighborhood was impressively decorated and landscaped. The buildings were faced with stone. Stone. I had stairs, and now I had stone.
There was a beautiful pool, walking paths along namesake springs, and a gazebo by a pond that would become a favorite late-night spot for me and my young friends. I can still picture the impossible blue of those waters. Now, I wonder why the people in charge felt the need to lie about the color of water.
Driving down I-270 toward Olive Boulevard, you’ll see this planned community, and you’ll likely notice the tidy pitched roofs, a retention pond dressed up as a lake, and the single row of trees that keeps the highway from exactly touching it all. It was a simulation of nature in American Midwest suburbia. The pretty makeup hid a secret sterility — a landscape engineered so thoroughly that no frog, squirrel, or bird would ever choose to settle there.
From the route, you wouldn’t have seen this teenager and her sick mother — or the secrets they kept behind the stone.
Little House
Mom’s space felt less like a bedroom and more like a hospital stage set — minimalist, overly lit, and serious. Mom’s only personal belongings were her boxsets of Little House on the Prairie, the series that encased her heart’s language. She knew the plot line of each episode, loved to make fun of Nelly (and every other character), and — she never said it, but I know — she revered Michael Landon for his masculinity. Can you picture Laura Ingalls’ Pa, that handsome farming man?
My mother recognized the differences between Pa and her own father, my grandpa Melroy, the divorced Jewish businessman. Both provided to others, but Pa’s warm dedication to his relationship with his wife and children was something that was missing from her own life. The show let her believe she was running in a pasture, playing with her siblings until her Ma expected them all back at the little house for supper.
From what I can piece together about my mother’s childhood, her experience of growing up did not include any emphasis on family values, hard work, or communing with the land. She has never been able to accept her upbringing for what it was. She has never moved past the pain she felt as a child.
Consequently, she never showed up as an adult for me.
The Blinders
The strife between us had not always been obvious. As a small child, I remember writing a passionate, prize-winning essay about my mom being my best friend. A Mother’s Day contest prompted, “I love my mom because…” and asked us to fill in the blank. I can’t remember what I wrote.
When I try to fill in that empty space now, I think of my mother’s adoration of animals and children. Her deep desire to teach. Her past life as a writer. Her passionately held opinions on music. And how, whenever she clipped my toenails, she would pretend they hit her in the eye — every time — because it made me laugh.
Childhood puts us in necessary cocoons. No — it’s more so nature makes us like workhorses with blinders on. Children growing up without reliable care need this narrowed sight. We look only at what’s directly ahead: surviving the day. The chaos at the edges exists, but it does not yet become ours to examine or understand.
We have a path to walk. Maybe it’s divine that a child can block out the poisons long enough to reach the moment they can begin again.
Boulder Springs is where I learned my mother was not the hero I had painted in that essay. She wasn’t taking care of me. At times, she was actively endangering me. What hurt most — and what still confuses me, even after years of separation — was realizing she belonged only to herself, when I was so desperate, as all children are, for her to choose me.
Ritual
My mother and I didn’t have many rituals together, but one we returned to was watching melodramatic daytime television in her bed after I came home from school.
An average afternoon, Sabrina, age fifteen—
I step off the school bus and put one foot in front of the other, making my way home through winding paths and flowing aqua springs. Inside, Mom is in her en suite bathroom. The door is nearly closed, but not shut. Yellow light filters through the frame — a tease. She could have closed it — locked it — but she didn’t.
Mom had shifted toward more lackadaisical boundaries. Three-year-olds turn knobs. Fifteen-year-olds live inside permissions they don’t realize they ever agreed to.
“Hi, I’m home,” I’d announce to the painted wood barrier as I settled onto her mattress.
“Hi honey,” she’d croak. “Start watching. I’ll be right there.”
I’d set my body atop the comforter and try to avoid contact with the stains. I’d turn on our soap and dictate the plot points aloud to her. Jessica’s dissociative identity disorder was causing a ruckus. Todd is dead. No — he’s alive. And…oh — he’s dead again.
Sometimes Mom would come out midway through an episode and lie next to me. Often she’d fall asleep with a heavy-hanging head. I would keep a conversation going until the elongated silence whispered: let it go.
The Handshake
These were the moments when we didn’t fight. When she slept, there was no window for fighting. Sleep allowed her to escape her life, which she seemed mostly to experience as a vessel for pain, overbearing responsibility, and, ultimately — boredom.
Before I was even conceived, my mother traded her mind, her presence, her hope, and her light — for fleeting flashes of euphoria.
Shaking hands with heroin cost her more than she could have known. After years of hiding the abscesses and the choices they represented, the legs that once stained the sheets were sawed off.
I grieve the bliss we never had and lament the hell she continues to choose.
Like an ignored houseplant, our relationship has died.
The Bell Toll
My life has been shaped by trying to heal from an upbringing where I was more alone than any child ever should be. Without a father or siblings, my mother was my whole home — and she never figured out how to commit to me. She was simultaneously obsessed with the idea of me and largely ignorant of my personhood and my child-needs.
Her care came as praise, not conscious presence. There was a constant tumble of doting lines about my beauty, intelligence, and talents, paired with intense absence and emotional volatility where reliability should have been. I could not depend on her to feed me when I was hungry, pick me up when I needed a ride, or sit with my questions and fears.
I learned to swallow those questions, gritty and thick going down, then tangled in my chest. When stating an explicit need, Mom met me with frozen doe eyes. Her head would begin to sag, lift, and fall again — like a bell tolled in the air — until the weight took her and she was gone.
The nodding off wasn’t confined to the bedroom. It followed us — through the glass at gymnastics, and in velvet theater seats as Elphaba levitated and belted her feral cry. My mother… like a machine, powered off.
I was too young to know what it meant, but this is what grieving a living mother was like. Reconciling that she was often under the same roof, yet existed in a very far away world.
In a high school assembly, someone mentioned heroin. It was the first time I heard the word aloud like that, and it broke the glass. My mother was an addict. What she offered instead of care were deposits of verbal flattery. I still feel forsaken in my body when relationships lack depth or follow-through — a familiar drop, a solitary panic, that old knowledge that no one is really there.
I still wish for a mom I could call. I missed my mom when I planned my wedding. I miss her now as my own motherhood becomes imminent. I don’t miss the person I met. I miss my mom. The one who never shook my hand. My grief is a bottomless ocean, for I understand there can never be another.
Only my mother is my mother.
Grieving a Living Mother
For a long time, I hid my feelings.
Now I can admit there is a dull scream stitched into my trachea. It’s the unrestrained wail of a little girl — the kind the Irish called keening — a raw, grief-torn sound beyond language.
I want my mommy.
My mommy. Her brown hair is dark, and her eyes are green. She was taller than me — before she lost her legs.
She often romanticized my deceased father. Without telling me much about him, she made it clear he had been the love of her life. I suspect she hoped they would conquer their vices and find a way to raise their daughter together. When he overdosed, she gave up. For most of our years together, she lived behind bathroom doors or inside hospitals. I survived. I have been very sad.
I wanted to be held the way a child expects to be held. Instead, something else carried me.
I picture my baby self in a basket sent down a river. I expected arms waiting at the bend. Instead, the men disappeared, and the women broke under the strain and laid down to rest. I spun in the current — not drowned, just dizzy — kept afloat by something I did not earn or choose. I arrived anyway.
Now, I am a grown woman with a clean bed.
Sometimes I think about the poppies in my spring garden — red and pink, brief and stunning. I touch their pods and collect their seeds in a small film canister. How much had to occur in our world for a flower in a field to become that which contorted so many human destinies?
Some of us are children who did not grow under the wings of our family.
But we are here. We are alive. And we are still capable of love.
If you are grieving a living mother,
— or any living person you had to let go of —
you are not alone in this disorienting grief.
I invite you to write to me about your own experience.
Compassion is cultivated in connection.
I’ve written elsewhere about noticing, inheritance, and release — in a softer piece called The Shape of a Wish.
https://nacoa.org/family-resources/
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