Five Minute Friday: Still Remembering My Mom Molly

Today would be my mother’s 70th birthday, I lost her in 2003, when she was just 55. She never met my 2 youngest children. 
The call came at 5:06am on a crisp October morning. It was a call I knew was coming. Things with my mom’s health had taken a turn the previous Monday and it was now Friday morning. “It happened last night,” the nurse said, “we found her holding the picture of you and the kids.” 
Those were the words that crossed the miles from Minnesota to San Diego, the words that ended any possibility of having a normal relationship with my mom. I always hoped we would get the chance to try yet once again, to get it right.😞
My mom was a HUGELY complicated woman, drug and alcohol addiction plagued her life from a young age. Addiction combined with an unplanned pregnancy, marriage of necessity, another baby 14 months after the first, and finally my younger brother 5 years later in an attempt to “save” the marriage  created a world she needed to constantly escape. Slowly and steadily marriage, motherhood, and addiction crushed her soul. 
When my mom was sober, she was amazingly creative, witty and everyone loved her. She sang, she wrote short stories and poetry, made beautiful pottery and loved life. I lived for these moments, time when I was able to get a “glimpse” of this woman I called mom. I had 2 brothers and no sisters so I relished time with my mom.
We sang out loud to ABBA and Neil Diamond, crafted late into the night and read EVERY book by Erma Bombeck. My mom filled my room with GOOD books and made me believe I could be a writer. She even let me transfer from Catholic to public school in 9th grade when I found out local author Garrison Keillor’s son attend the same school.😊 
However, these moments were few and far too brief, my mother’s sickness left me feeling alone and abandoned. I know she tried her hardest, sometimes our demons are simply too strong. I’m grateful for the time I did have with my mother, and though the anger has gone away, there are times I weep at being motherless and alone. The journey as a mother to my own 3 girls has, at times been influenced by my lack of leadership in in my own childhood. At the same time, my most precious traditions, especially around the Holidays, started with my mom. 
Each year I try to spend her birthday doing some baking or shopping, things she loved the most at Christmas. I tell my children stories and I keep her alive and with us. 
She was never able to write her own story or live the life that she was meant to live. I speak life into  those stories and I write them down, my mother has a legacy with me.❤️
Happy Birthday Mom! I love you!

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