If I could ask my mother one question, I would have to make out a list and whittle it down to the question that most encompasses all the answers I seek. I am amazed at how respondents are quite clear of what they would ask their mothers if allowed but one question.
Their questions are extremely well-thought out. Perhaps they made a list as I would do. And yet making a list would not seem to capture the complete essence of what I seek.
I am extremely curious about my mother. I am a psychotherapist. And so I want to know. I would love for my mother to tell me the story of her life including self-revelation and philosophical reflection.
This is so unlike who my mother was. She has been dead to this world for nearly twenty years. Our third and last child never knew or saw her, my mother having died three years earlier.
While pregnant with out youngest, I imagined that the spirit of my mother hovered around me, wanted to inhabit the body of our youngest child and daughter. I do not know if I liked or hated the idea. On some level it seemed somewhat interesting to have my mother return in the form of a daughter I would nurture.
I would care for her in a way far different from how she had mistreated me. I would give my mother the love she deprived me of. I would infuse her with the self-confidence I now sense she sorely lacked.
Another part of me feared her re-entrance into my life. I did not want her back. After fearing what life would be like without her, despite her difficult way of being, I quickly learned in the wake of her demise from gall bladder cancer, that freedom held a sweet taste of which one can become quite accustomed.
Living with my mother, both as a child and later as an adult some 5000 miles from her held a quality of imprisonment. Our lives were indelibly bound, my actions driven by memories of hers, I forever questioning the rightness of what I was doing.
With her dead, I could somehow move forward and not look back for direction or in fear of her questioning or critiquing me. I would see nothing even if I did. She no longer existed in bodily form.
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