Vomitus

***disclaimer***
Since my mother's death I've discovered a new penchant for spewing verbal vomit....

I need to be honest.

I'm not grieving my mother the way most daughters grieve their mother.

All of the sorrow, all of the anguish, all of the aloneness a woman/girl would ordinarily feel when their mother dies, I experienced years ago when my mother and I mutually decided to sever our relationship.

At that time, I was finished with my mother's verbal and emotional abuse. I had reached a place in my life, where I finally had the strength and the conviction that was necessary to ask my mother to cease and desist her attacks. I asked her to stop telling me that I was horrible wife, daughter, sister and mother. I asked if we could speak to one another with respect and kindness.

Her response: "I'm not going to fucking change for you or anyone else."

That was my mother. Blunt, to the point and unchanging.

Over a decade ago, I realized I would never have the mother I dreamed and longed to have. I also realized that because I had set healthier boundaries with my mother, I would no longer experience even the dysfunctional mother/daughter relationship we had previously shared.

I was cut off. Bereft. Motherless.

Some might say now, (and many actually did then) that this was/is no great loss; but for me, this was a huge and significant loss and it was one which I deeply and profoundly mourned.

And oh, how I mourned. It was a grieving process that took me several years to live my way through.

Now that I am confronted with my mother's physical death, I find that there are new things to feel, to release and to grieve. I wasn't prepared for this new sense of loneliness, or the finality of death's abandonment. Nor was I prepared to relinquish the hope which I have guarded in my heart all these years.

You see, as long as my mother was alive, my hope for reconciliation was alive too. My hope that we might one day embrace one another in love and peace, must now be laid to rest. If I grieve, I think it is this one lost opportunity, that I grieve the most.

I believe that God is in the resurrection business....and so, I trust in Him that even this dead and lifeless hope may be reborn, transformed, and made new!

Right now, that's more than enough to get me through the day.