FRIENDS FOR LIFE

I have often wondered whether I am anything like my mother in the positive attributes she had. I know that my tongue is fierce, my judgment swift, and my tastes fine, but what about the deeper things? My mother had a penchant for friendships that have seemed to elude me over these years. I thought myself broken and incapable of making friends and that lasting friendships were not my thing. I realize now that it was my trauma of losing those I loved that caused me to push others away who mattered to me the most. So if anyone who is reading this feels I did this to them, I am sorry. I grew up without that guiding light that we need well into our 20s and even our 30s and 40s if we are so fortunate. I can only hope to be that for William all the way throughout our lives.

My mother had this light about her when around people and had a penchant for saying the right thing, telling the right story, and had a laugh that I have tried to mimic and have failed out over the years. I envied that about her; her ability to get people to like her and my inability to have the people that liked me stick around. I thought I was destined to have nothing more than surface relationships and fleeting deepness that evaded my desire for long-term friendships through thick and thin. Her friends were there through boyfriends, kids, marriages, divorces, bankruptcy, death, sickness, health, wealth, and joy. They left with her death, as I represented her lost hope of happiness due to the normal young adult strain of daughter/mother relationships, which was stretched thin at the time she died. I have learned that I am all the things she was and all the things she would have wanted to be. She would be so proud of the life I have built to this point. I own my own home, and I am raising a good young man she would be proud to have as a grandson, my two dogs, spoiled beyond belief, the career I love, and, most notably, I have found a way to develop relationships that I hope and believe can stand the test of time. They come from a place of personal happiness and not chasing the high of trying to be like someone whose approval I so desperately wanted yet could never obtain because she was no longer there to give it. I also have found a love for myself that has come to fill the void of her love that I lost 20 years ago.

It is hard to think about this anniversary and realize that this is a significant boundary of time that I am crossing, not just because it was two decades ago. The 20th anniversary of 9/11 marks the point where my mother has been gone from my life equally as long as she was in my life. Every year from now forward is one more year without her, for which I don’t have the counterbalance of her presence. I feel her presence in so many subtle ways and realize that it is not the outside things that make her present, but the ways I am like her that are great and that I can pass down to my son. I also realize she would be crazed over the state of my bedroom, my current weight/size, my dogs being snuggled under the covers every night, and the fact I never married. I would gladly take back the tirades over all of those inane things to have her back in my life, fixing some of them so that she would have new things to pick at or would maybe finally relax and say she was done as a mom and could focus on being a grandma. My son would never know a closer shave or cleaner clothes in his life. He wouldn’t know a good meal either, since she hated to cook, no one is perfect, and that’s perfectly perfect.

Lesli

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