Fair Warning: this is not a particularly happy story but making Art did help me come to terms with loss and mortality, once again.
When my mother died we were not on the best of terms, not that we ever had been. Even though confidants had said I should not harbor regrets, those boats are moored with sturdy knots to my pscyhe's dock. Yes, distance and time does soften many a hard memory and dull the sharpest of pains. All though my life, whenever Mother's Day came around, despite it also being my birthday, I struggled to feel happy and to select a card to send, a sentiment that was not an outright lie, to wish my mother a "happy mother's day". It is uncomfortable feeling sick over the emotions that ran so counter to all the lovey appreciation that Mother's Day is supposed to demonstrate.
We all have our failings. None of us have a 'Get out of Jail' card when it comes to the recognizing the inevitable errors we've made while trying to mature into decent human beings. We make mistakes, not all of which can be so easily glossed over. Though I had worked with some diligence to repair the relationship and bridge the gap of living a thousand miles away from my mother, it was not enough.
It was never enough.
I didn't expect my mother to die, even though she was in her 90's.
I thought she would outlive me, her only child. Sure, she had some recent stints in the hospital and her heart was failing, her mind, too, but I was still stunned when I was informed she was dead. There was a lot of anger there. Anger at myself for agreeing not to be there because she told me not to come. Anger at the last year of her life when we barely spoke to one another.
After the fact it became clear all that she had been hiding from me - her gambling addiction that had a second mortgage on the house that was once paid in full, the huge debts she piled up from casinos, so many of her treasures and collections gone to finance her need to win big at something, the extent of her disability. What was almost worse was discovering how distant her own siblings had become and their complete lack of caring that she had died or my assumption they'd even want to know. Well, shocks come to us and either we roll with the punches or we are flattened. It wasn't easy rolling but I apparently did though it has taken several years.
In this I am not alone. Others have shared with me the difficulties they had with parents and some were angry enough to not attempt repairs or forgiveness. I'm hoping that those people won't become burdened with grief and regret for not saying "I love you" and "I forgive you - please also forgive me" before it is too late.
I spent 4 months in my mother's house after she died, trying to clean, dispose of the remnants, arrange with the attorney and realtor and creditors all the gruesome realities of "losing everything." I had misplaced my anger and sadness often enough on the people who were only there because they had to be and they told me : "Hey, I wasn't the one making your mother gamble her life away." Can you even imagine how infuritating it is to be barraged by all the advertisings now for Sport's Gambling all over the TV, as any but the already wealthy can play those games. Gambling addiction is as deadly as Heroin - so don't even take a taste.
If I have a message here it is this: don't throw your money away thinking you'll get rich quick.
You think the lottery climbs to millions of dollars because there are so many winners?
So mom is gone. Her ashes are in a nice Chinese vase she tried to make into a lamp, I'm thinking, because of the hole busted in the bottom of it. I tell her ashes I am sorry things couldn't have been better between us and I try to reassure her that she should be happy for me, that my life has been good and unlike her, my marriage is also. The image at the top of the page is one of the many paintings I did over the top of photographs of hers - landscapes she liked but were not particularly meaningful to anyone else. The house seemed "too old fashioned" for prospective buyers so I "modernized" the impression with abstract art. In a way this ironic collaboration worked. I had no choice but to sell the house for what was owed on it, so sacrificing more of her memories to that end was the best I could do. A few years later, just before COVID struck, I made the other object, in the next photo above, the doll house with carved baby feet holding up the base, my own baby shoes under it, and the house full of symbolic objects - the title: Exorcising Childhood, and I am pictured there next to it, the shaman of my own ritual, the mystical assemblage honoring all of us who may have had difficult relationships with the woman who bore us. I am happy to be alive. I know that we loved each other at a basic level and possibly a very deep level that we simply never had the tools to express in a healthy manner.
I hope that you have a better relationship with your birth mother but I am here to tell you that you can make a ritual of repair and reconciliation now, even if it is just a letter that you write, read outloud and then burn. Do what you can to put it to rest, close the chapter, and move on to finish your story with a happy ending.