An Ongoing Search for My Mother

I’ve written before that I spent the first thirty years of my life trying not to be like my mother, and the next thirty realizing how much we were alike. And now that I’m over sixty? I’m trying to find my mother, who died when I was fifty-eight.

Mother and me on my wedding day

Mother and I never were very close. We rarely fought, even when I was a teenager. Throughout my childhood, I did what she told me to. I simply didn’t tell her about things I did that I knew she wouldn’t like. That worked for both of us.

Despite our outwardly peaceable relationship, when I was in college, before I came home to visit for holidays or the summer, I frequently dreamed that she and I argued long and loudly. None of these dreams ever came true, but subconsciously I must have feared we would fight. I suppose that was the normal reaction of a young woman seeking to separate herself from her mother.

I say we weren’t close because Mother and I didn’t talk about important things. I have never related to friends of mine who say their mothers (or their daughters) are their best friends. That isn’t the relationship Mother and I had.

Once, after my two children were born, I told her I’d always worried while pregnant that I might miscarry because she had had several miscarriages. Her miscarriages were milestones in my childhood, and I sensed her despair when I was young, though she never spoke of it. I never raised the topic with her when I was pregnant because I didn’t want to cause her pain.

“Oh, Theresa,” she told me when I finally brought it up. “I never talked to you about those things because I didn’t want you to worry.”

So both of us were avoiding the topic. She thought I would worry if I knew the facts. Instead, I worried about what I didn’t know.

I’ve written before about how I never felt I could tell Mother how difficult I found it to raise children while working. Whenever I tried, her response was simply, “I don’t know how you do it.” Which to me implied she thought I was doing it reasonably well, even when I didn’t think I was.

That’s how our relationship went—we couldn’t talk about most things that really mattered. And so, since her death, I have tried to find out who she was, what she thought about all the things we never discussed.

After my parents died, I ended up with some of Mother’s journals. As I’ve mentioned before, she kept two types of journals—travel diaries, which my sister kept, and journals in which she wrote about her scripture studies and other spiritual readings, which I kept.

I have been thumbing through Mother’s spiritual journals searching for what she hoped and dreamed. In my journal, I often write about such things. Unfortunately, she wrote very little about her personal life.

One of my mother’s journals. Post-It tabs are mine.

Most of her journals—and they consist of a boxful of spiral-bound notebooks covering about two decades of her life—appear to be summaries of what she read. Mother read the Bible and commentary on Biblical readings daily, and her faith was very deep, far deeper than my own. But she rarely interjected any personal response to these readings, and when she did, she only wrote a sentence or two.

I have gleaned that she hoped to use these journals as a springboard to write on spiritual topics and how her faith had helped her in life. There were places in the journals where she noted “writing topic.” But she never wrote these pieces. I don’t know why she didn’t.

In her 1999 journal that I’m perusing now, she wrote:

“Jesus saw beyond what people were to what they were capable of being. [She underlined this sentence, and I interpret that to mean she took it from what she had read that day.] Is this my call to do the Lord’s work through my inspired writing, ‘once again’? May I have the dedication ‘this time’ to follow through and answer, ‘Here I am Lord—Your servant is listening.’”

Her emphasis on “once again” and “this time” told me she had had this dream of undertaking inspirational writing for a long time. Her failure to ever do it made me wonder—as she did—if she truly was called to write or whether she was called to contemplation without action instead.

Reading her journals makes me reflect on the differences in people—those who feel called and do, and those who feel called but who, for whatever reason, do not follow through. It saddens me to think of Mother in that latter category. Because if she had written as she aspired to write, I would know her better.

My mother was a good mother, one who directed her energy into mothering and into being, as she put it, “the heart of the home,” rather than into her own ambitions. As her child, I benefited from her self-effacement. And yet, I wish she had put energy into her own passions as well—for her children’s sake as well as for her own.

Children benefit from having parents who love them unconditionally. But I think children also benefit from seeing their parents—mothers as well as fathers—work toward their personal goals. No matter how much Mother focused on her children, as her daughter I wish she had pursued her own dreams as well.

What do you wish your mother had done differently?