UPDATE 11:50am: I’m more awake now that it’s nearly noon, and I realized upon re-reading that I wasn’t always clear, so I’ve added a few things. However, I left the weirdness just for kicks.

I ought to be in bed asleep at this hour, so if this seems ramble-y and weird, take that into account. I have to be a church semi-early to serve before first service, but I cannot sleep. I’m concerned about someone I love who is very sick. And I’m missing my mom pretty bad right now. "The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" is on television. It isn’t helping my state of mind, except maybe to give me another reason to cry.

Warning! Side note here that has nothing to do with the rest of the post. Read at your own discretion, or skip the next three paragraphs: I first saw this movie in the theatre near MLC in one of my many I-must-escape-the-pressure-cooker-called-"orientation" moments. I saw it with a friend who was debriefing a hellish three years overseas and also needed an escape. The irony that she came home from a team embroiled in conflict similar to the team I stepped into (unknowingly)and gave me strong warnings about teaming issues in the IMB, and then that I came home around the same time she was finally feeling better about the IMB and was headed back overseas (to the same island where I had lived, no less, but fortunately to a different team) after spending over a year struggling through similar anger and depression which I was just on my way into, AND (yes there’s more and I can make this sentence much, much longer) that I moved into her old room in her sister’s home for six months and discovered through conversations with her sister that we reacted in pretty much the same ways to our situations overseas—none of that has never been lost on me. —-Hey, you were duly warned….

I don’t know why, but I have never been able to to watch "Divine Secrets" and not remember all of the above. It all just befuddles me that God had Catricia’s and my paths cross at such key and similar points for both of us. In a way, it’s our own form of the Ya-Yas; the single-women missionaries who’ve been wounded in battle by friendly fire and lived to serve again.

At any rate, the theatre where we saw "Divine Secrets" was absolutely packed with that wonderful brand of women found only in the South who, much to our California-girls amusement, howled and cackled their way through the whole thing. I think we laughed more because of the laughter from all the Southern Steele Magnolias in the theatre than from the movie itself. At certain points, however, I know there was not a dry eye in the house. —End of random-y weirdness.

As women we spend waste so much time fighting with and about our mothers, blaming them for all our woes, for "ruining our lives" and leaving us with scars so deep that we fear commitment, love, abandonment, even life itself. Why do we do that? Its not like we’ll get our childhood back, change the history of our family or give her a sudden epiphany of the pain she wreaked upon us. Nor does it do us much good to dwell too long on the negative and it certainly doesn’t keep us from repeating all the mistakes she made. We may learn from some of them, but we only replace those with new ones of our own. It is so rare to meet a woman who doesn’t have a sense of schizophrenia when it comes to her mother. I’m always amazed when I run across a woman who says she loves only adores her mom and thinks she’s the greatest. I alternately wonder what she’s been smoking and how long she will remain in denial, and seriously envy her for having such a glorious mom and wish I’d been born into her family. All of us, if we are honest, have a love-hate relationship with our mom, perhaps not as extreme or neurotic as Siddalee and Vivi but just as prone to wide swings of emotion. We fluctuate between wanting to be just like our moms and feeling disgusted when we hear her voice emanating from our lips (even those of us without children end up sounding just like our mothers at times and are always just as horrified as our maternal counterparts).

Don’t get me wrong; I understand full well that our moms leave scars on
us women that sometimes take a lifetime to heal. We are a product of
our family of origin (whether biological or otherwise) and that family can leave us limping into
adulthood with missing pieces and parts as well as huge scars that hang
like ugly appendages around our hearts. But the truth of the matter is that while they may have affected who we were when we entered adulthood, we are the ones responsible for who we are now as adults. I can no more blame my mom for my adult choices to hide from love and to cultivate an extremely unhealthy fear of man (as in humankind) than I can  blame  George W for the price of the iPhone. But that doesn’t stop me from trying.

I have alternately blamed and idolized my mom throughout my life, depending on where I was at the time. Neither image is truthful or fair to her. She was just a broken woman like me, doing the best she could and loving me the only way she knew how. Yes, I bear scars from when she missed the mark, but I am also the heiress of a vast fortune of blessings only my mom could bestow; a passionate love for people, an intimate and unique relationship with God and a deep conviction that God really does talk to me and that prayer really does change the world, among many others. I cannot blame her for who I have become; I can only understand how her own struggles impacted me as a child and choose to become someone no longer controlled by the past.

For all my blaming and idolizing and struggling with the scars left by her brokenness, I am who I am today in large part because of my mother. Because I both aspire to be like her and at the same time fight like hell to be anything but; because, for better or worse, the sins and the blessings of a mother are visited upon her daughters, to the fourth and fifth generations; because she was so determined to be different than her own mom and to right the wrongs she saw in her own childhood, and because God saw fit to bless me with this amazing woman as my mom and this woman with me as her "baby" daughter, I am, in all respects that matter most to God, my mother’s daughter.

And I miss her. Sometimes, like today, desperately.

I miss her smile. I miss how she would sing certain instructions because she thought perhaps they’d be more palatable that way (they never were, but she always was). I miss her cold hand and creative use of them on my bare legs or tummy to get me out of bed in the mornings. I miss her Kleenexes stuck in her bra because "you never know when you might need one and these pants don’t have pockets." I miss her calling me "Pau-Vic-Nee-Mary Lu!" (the complete, if abbreviated, list of her children). I deeply miss her laughter. She could light up a room just by walking in but she lit up the whole world every time she laughed. It was the most beautiful sound in the universe to me. I remember laying in bed at night and hearing her and dad’s muffled voices through the walls as they talked on and on –their conversations were always peppered with mom’s laughter and that was the thing that helped me let the stress of the day go more than anything else.

But what I am missing most right now is my mom’s huge heart and wide open arms. Whenever anything was bothering, frightening or hurting me I could always run to her and she would hold me, letting me cry until all my tears were spent as she caressed my head and rubbed my back. Eventually I would find the energy to get up and step back into life, but until then, mom held me together.

Without my mom, my life seems diminished. I have to be a grown up now; I have to be the "strong" one, strong for myself and strong for others, even though I don’t feel strong at all. I know my mom herself would be crying and hurting right now were she here, but it doesn’t stop me from missing her and wishing with all my might that I could run back into her arms and cry till all my tears are spent. I wonder if she felt the same way at times.