Stone Baby

 I received a card in the mail today from my Aunt Connie. Although Mother’s Day has been well seated in my consciousness this week, with planning crafts for my students to make at school and fielding Anna’s incessant questions about what may be on my wishlist, the thick pink envelope in my mailbox brought with it some sort of magnetic gravity that pulled my thoughts to things I’ve tucked away, to raw, frayed scraps of emotion I’ve heaped in a pile to be sorted and mended at a different time.

Last year for Mother’s Day, I ordered two blouses for Mom from JCPenney. Ever the gracious recipient, Mom spoke of her excitement to have them and wear them over the coming summer. You’d think, by her reaction, that the gift was a thoughtful surprise, but it wasn’t. She actually helped me pick out the blouses, sitting folded forward with her elbows on her knees and readers perched at the end of her nose, watching my laptop screen as we scrolled through JCPenney’s online selection of women’s tops. The ones we settled on were both three-quarter sleeved. One was floral blue with a dropped shoulder, and the other was an approachable coral with a coordinating necklace included. 

I know for a fact the shirts weren’t actually wrapped and ready for Mother’s Day and that they came late. On the day itself, I’m sure I gifted Mom some sort of hand-written note with an IOU for the coming blouses. She received it with genuine joy, and then--in true Mom fashion--she turned around and pulled a Mother’s Day card out of her purse with my name scrawled across the envelope. In my mind’s eye, the envelope was thick and pink--just like the one I received this afternoon--but the truth is that details like color and shape and form don’t lodge in my brain with a fraction of the clarity of the unnamed emotion of moments, of the spark that propels stories and relationships and lives forward. Mom had underlined pieces of the printed card greeting and signed off with her love. A $50 bill lay in the crease. On Mother’s Day, she was so proud of my motherhood, of me. The delight in her face as she gave me her gift made me feel as though I’d duped her somehow. I’m not half the mother or daughter she gave me credit for being, not half as beautiful as she believed me to be. Since Mom died last August, I’ve yet to see that unbridled adoration reflected back at me in anyone else’s face--mine included--and sometimes, the loss of it feels like another mini-death of its own. 

Aunt Connie is gifted with words and picks beautiful, thoughtful cards. The one that came today had an intricate front, cut like an abstract window to reveal an image of vibrant flowers on the panel beneath and protected by a sleeve of clear cellophane. My mind drifted to the clothes rack at Mom’s by the laundry room door where one of her Mother’s Day blouses hung--the coral one with the necklace. The protective plastic sleeve was still around the necklace when we finally boxed up her clothes to give away. Summer was a far cry from what we had envisioned when we picked out the blouse on my laptop. She never had the chance to wear it.

Inside the card from Aunt Connie, tender words of encouragement for me as a mom made my heart physically ache--out of appreciation and unearthed grief all at once. It was a weird sensation, more good than bad, but it felt bigger and weightier than the feelings I can examine and wrangle well in this season of my life. If I’m honest, I’ve been untethered in this past year--losing grip on goals and emotions and sense of self as I continue to be carried downstream by time. Landmarks on the riverbanks look unfamiliar here and are passing me by before I can learn them well or get my bearings. 

In the first months after Mom died, I had such a physical sense of ache in my chest that I actually scheduled an appointment with a cardiologist. I think a devastated, irrational part of me wondered if the same biological and emotional brokenness that had ultimately wrecked Mom’s heart had somehow passed to me, nestling itself tight beneath my ribcage, finding a new home to burn through its destructive angst. Faint glimmers of sane logic and a clear EKG at my primary practice physician’s office gave me courage to cancel the appointment and to take a few early steps toward trying to heal, trying to see which of my injuries could still bear weight, needing motion to strengthen. 

Today, I'm steadier on my feet and without the sharp agony of early loss. I’ve borne the grief of losing Mom for nearly 9-months--practically a pregnancy term. In a sense, that parallel tracks: Pregnancy and grief both carry with them uncertainty and demand change--ready or not. (Still, what an odd comparison to make. It must be my Mother’s Day brain knitting things strangely together.)

A few years ago, I watched a documentary (or internet news feature) about an elderly woman in a third-world country who was found carrying a “stone baby.” In her young womanhood, she had become pregnant and carried a healthy baby to term, but difficult labor and other biological/physiological forces I can’t recall caused her body to be unable to successfully deliver the child. She experienced excruciating pain, but at some point, the baby died, the pain subsided, and her own body fossilized the child inside her--mineralizing tissue until she was left with a literal stone baby. She lived the rest of her life carrying a permanent reminder, at once heavy burden and gift, that tied her to what she had hoped for and what she had lost. 

In a sense, maybe that’s what my own 9 months of grief has been creating within me. I’ve harbored so much--unable and unwilling to release and untangle my own response to losing Mom--that some of my memories and emotions and reactions have calcified into a solid, nameless mass. The ache of it has been a weight, for certain, but it has also been a peculiar companion to me. With my reluctance to do the work of sorting, I think I recognize that a knotted up thing is less likely to slip away to a place I may never find it again than fragile tendrils released and carried away into wide, wild air. 

When my dad died, I wrote wisely to myself that I needed to remember that my ability to remember, to hoard thoughts of him and pieces of his life, was not cosmically responsible for his life to have meaning or for his existence to somehow continue. While remembrance is a precious gift, a person’s value doesn’t rest solely in my hands, fading away if I can’t wrestle forth the words to mark that value well, to chronicle his impact, to do his life story justice. 

I’d do well to revisit this wisdom as I finally gather strength to disinter all I’ve stuffed into dark places, as I bring my own “stone baby” into the light and place it before Jesus, asking what to do with it,

how to love well,

how to heal,

how to seek his face. 

I miss my Mama like crazy. Jesus knows.

This Mother's Day, I am grateful for a God who deeply knows and loves the hearts of mothers and daughters alike, who trades gladness for mourning and holds every tomorrow.

--L