Little Lost Girl

My mother would have been sixty-five years old on April 4th of this year. Except she won’t be sixty-five. She won’t ever be a grandmother this side of eternity, either, because she died when she was twenty-four. I was nine months old when she passed, and it’s safe to say my childhood was marked by her absence. Most of my photographs show a smileless girl. A girl who yearned for her mother, but regardless of how hard she searched, that little lost girl couldn’t find the pieces to make herself whole again. Well, not until many, many years later, that is.  

Missing

I remember feeling like my mother was a fairytale: just another story I was told. My mama… a fictional character who loved art and dancing. Never real. Never present. Not in the way I needed her to be. Not in the way I still need her to be. 

She is missing...

Missing from memories. Missing from family photographs. Missing my wedding, the birth of my son, and so many other countless life events. She has missed it all, and it wounds me. 

I have spent forty-one years missing my mother. Forty-one years writing stories of what could have been. Writing about mothers in my books who I longed to love me. Writing… writing… it feels like all I have. Another fictional world where my mama can live. 

Tapestry

Grief is a fickle bastard. One second I am overjoyed, smiling at the flowers and hanging out with my chicken. And then, a song begins to play on my phone: “Tapestry” by Carole King. My breath catches for a moment. Her song. Her music. Her favorite. Sorrow moves over me like an obsidian cloud. Heavy. Thick. Suffocating. 

“And I wept to see him suffer, though I didn’t know him well.” The words paralyze me. 

“Mama…” I murmur into the bright April day. Sunshine warms my skin but has little effect on the icicle that has become my heart.

A yellow and black butterfly rests on a purple forget-me-not flower just beside me. Is it possible she is missing me, too? Is the butterfly a reminder of something just beyond my vision that my eyes cannot see: a veil I cannot lift? 

“Mom,” my youngest child calls for me.

I lift my head. The butterfly flies away. Reality sweeps over me, once more. My children will never know my mother. I never knew my mother. But I can be the mother she never got the chance to be. I can create memories, smile in family photographs, and be there.

“Yes, love,” I call back. “I’m here.”

My mother: Rebecca Elizabeth (Peterson) Estrada.

A photo of me smiling as a child. I wonder what I’m thinking here.