I have felt guilty all week that I have not been able to write about the 10th anniversary of my mother’s death. But I will now try to put into words what I have been feeling and thinking these past several days.

On the morning of April 11th, I woke up to the baby’s pre-crying whimpers with a dreadful anxiety. I nursed the baby back to sleep, but my own desperate mind kept me awake, spinning out all kinds of disaster scenarios- mainly about me dying, leaving my son behind, and not have achieved anything of note. Dying mediocre. “Why am I so anxious?” I asked myself. Then I remembered — this was the day. I think. Because she died in the middle of the night, she could have died on the 11th of April or the 12th. I do not even have the dim security of knowing exactly when she passed. But when I finally realized what was going on, I gave myself the permission to cry that I had denied myself, lying rigid in my bed.

I went to my meditation altar and lit a candle. I cried. I prayed for her to show me a sign that she was still around and watching over me. I prayed over and over for a sign. An MDC mama had posted something about “pennies from heaven” and that is what I thought I wanted. A penny in a place that no penny could have mortally gotten to. A penny to prove her spirit watches over me. A penny to prove that her spirit knows her grandson.

But I already have the proof - Sami has my mother’s smile.

I am reading Motherless Mothers, the new book by Hope Edelman, and she says something very interesting: “Before motherhood, a motherless daughter’s story has a distinct before-and-after quality: all that came before her mother died, and all that has come after. Motherhood, however, puts a conceptual frame around the loss. First, she had a mother, then she lost her, then she became a mother herself. The loss no longer breaks her story in two. Motherhood rounds it out.” (p. 7) I find that is very true: I no longer divide my life into that Great Before and After. There is another Before and After - a counter-balance.

I miss my mother, the true Gail Harris, but I also miss the idea of her. Like Hope, I want a mother who will swoop in and initiate me into the tribe of mothering. A mother who will know what to do, just how to comfort Sami, when I have tried everything and still his little forehead is creased in sorrow and rage, his tiny mouth wide open in a baby’s wail of suffering.

I have a grandmother, my mother’s mother, the woman who raised me instead of my mother. She has started to call almost every day to check on Sami’s progress, and is as in love with my son as anyone can be. I am eternally grateful that she is still in my life, but even she cannot replace the presence of my mother. Especially since she does not particularly approve of my attachment parenting practices, and can never understand my heartbreak at not being able to successfully breastfeed, because she herself never breastfed her children.

I think back to the pain of our early breastfeeding, how Mumma’s story intersected with mine. How desperately I wanted breastfeeding to work, not just for Sami and myself but for her. My failure was like yet another betrayal of my mother. No one can possibly understand how much it hurts to have failed.

I think of her separated from me, hospitalized after yet another psychotic break, breasts engorged, not able to nurse to relieve the pressure. When did her milk finally dry up? How she must have grieved the end of our short-lived breastfeeding relationship, when it meant so much to her to begin with. She fought for it so hard, at a time when women were led to believe that formula was just as good as breastmilk. What was important to her was the bonding, I imagine. I imagine, because I will never know why she was so keen on breastfeeding. I never asked her about these things, because when she died I was twenty and couldn’t care less about pregnancy or labor or breastfeeding or anything having to do with mothering.

(At the time, I thought I would never be a mother, because a gynecologist, suspecting PCOS, had told me I would have a very hard time conceiving. Turns out she was wrong.)

My mother’s legacy has shaped my own parenting choices. I know she would have completely supported, even cheered on my decision to have a home birth, to co-sleep with Sami, to eventually homeschool (which I am seriously considering). These choices resonate with me personally, but knowing she would have approved makes me happy. I feel like I am honoring her crunchy legacy. And I am mothering in the way I would have liked to have been mothered by her, if she had had the chance. It is redeeming. It is cleansing. It is healing. As a mother, joy and grief co-mingle in my heart, pulsating with every beat. They are both surrounded with love - the vast, all-encompassing love I feel for my tiny son. I now understand how much my mother loved me, and it’s humbling, awe-inspiring, to love and to have been loved like that.