Dear Mom

If you were still alive, I probably would not have called you today.

I'm not sure I called you last year to wish you a happy Mother's Day. I'm not entirely sure what I was doing, but I'm sure it involved avoiding speaking to you.

I've spent a lot of this afternoon looking at old pictures of you and regretting the fact that there are no pictures, at least in my possession, of me as an adult with you.

Five years is a long time to not see your mother. The longer it went, the easier it was to pretend I didn't really have a mother. There was so much pain and so much hurt, and it all kept getting dredged up over and over again. Like raking the bottom of the ocean for salvage from a shipwreck.

This time last year, give or take a few months, I sat in my room and cried for the mother I had lost, the mother I wanted, the mother I missed. I never called to talk to you about it, Mom. I never called to tell you I needed you still. Everything fell apart for you again that summer,and I tried to help as best I could, but it's hard to cross thousands of miles on a phone line, and even harder to cross years of resentment.

Looking at these old pictures of you, I see glimpses of who you were as a young mother. You were a beauty that I still feel I can't compete with or emulate. There was a certain level of shyness in your pictures, as well. I really don't think you ever knew how beautiful you really were. There are pictures of you singing, pictures of you with your sisters, and at your wedding to my father.

You didn't know this, but I asked grandma to send me pictures of you after I got home from Michigan last summer. I sat at her kitchen table and pored over huge photo albums, trying to get to know my mother who had essentially been a stranger to me my whole life.

You and I never talked. Not really. I have a skeleton of knowledge about you. All I have are memories of you up in the middle of the night to make instant rice, or toast. Memories of your morning routine when you meticulously applied your makeup, Memories of you twisting and pulling my curly blonde hair until I thought my head would fall apart. Us singing to Jordan on the way to daycare so she would sleep. Christmases and birthdays and homecoming games. Memories of every fight and every screaming match.

I remember leaving your house when I was fourteen and knowing I was doing the right thing, but knowing I was killing you. I'm worried you never really recovered from that. And then I did you one worse, and moved to Tennessee for college. I lived this whole life separate from having a mother. And then you moved to California.

When you told me you were moving out there, I cried with you on the phone. I was convinced I would never see you again. It was so far away, I said. I wanted to come visit, but the money was never there. The last time I saw you in good health, I was twenty years old and at my sister's college graduation. You were drunk and pulled me into the spare bedroom and asked me to drink wine with you. I said Dad wouldn't let me because I wasn't 21 yet, and you said "I think I can have a glass of wine with my daughter." You said some awkward things to Dad that night. The whole situation was very uncomfortable for me. I honestly don't remember saying goodbye to you. And that was the last time I saw you until you were yellow and withered in a hospice bed.

Mom, there is so much I wanted you to know about me. That I'm overcoming my anxiety problems, and that I still struggle with body image every day and will always need your help with that. I wanted you to know I have the best and most sincere group of friends who have made me their family. I started doing stand up comedy. I'm kicking ass at my job. My hair has been every color of the rainbow since I was twenty.

Remember when I was in the Walgreen's waiting on my antibiotics and you asked me to send you a selfie? You said that you hadn't seen me in so long, and you wanted to know what I looked like.

You couldn't attend my college graduation because you had just gotten diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, and the money wasn't there, also. I know how proud you were of me, that I finished, especially after everything I had been going through in college.

It breaks my heart that you never got to hear me perform my senior recital, or hear that I had gotten much better at guitar than I was in high school.

I'm sorry I was a distant and awful daughter, Mom. Looking at these pictures of you, I want so badly to know you. I want to reverse time and take back all of the moments I missed. Take back all of the fights. Gosh, death makes things so clear.

You always apologized for being a bad mother, but I know now you did the best you could with what you were given. We all make choices, Mom. And as I sat next to your bed in California, watching you go, wishing I could hear you yell at me one more time, I learned the real meaning of forgiveness.

Thank you for using your every breath to teach me, right down to your last one.

I miss you in a way that defies description. It hits me at strange times. Like when I'm working Nightfall, and it'ss o crowded, and I get anxious, and I remember how you hated crowds. But you never met a stranger. Or when certain songs come on that I forgot you even loved until they're playing at work and I suddenly can't breathe for missing you.

I'm sorry I ever yelled at you for not learning time zones because I would give anything to hear your voice at 2 AM on a Monday night again.

I'm so sorry I wasn't a better daughter to you and I let things get in the way of our relationship. I always said that I would never have a relationship with my mother. I'm sorry, and I should have tried harder.

I wish that I could know for sure you knew all of these things when you went, but you know I haven't been a spiritual person for years. Maybe writing them makes me feel better. Maybe in some way these words find their way through some sort of ether. I doubt that.

If you were still alive, I probably wouldn't have called you today. So thank you, Mom, finally...for giving me an experience that ensures I will never take another relationship for granted again. I thought we had more time to fix things. I'm so sorry that we didn't.

I love you.

Morgan.