Grieving a Mother Who Is Alive

She sees her about once a month. It is perfectly civil.

They have a coffee and her mother talks about a neighbor and about a program she has been watching, and there is a moment around the forty minute mark when the conversation has run out and both of them can feel it, and one of them mentions the traffic.

Her mother is not cruel. She is not a monster and there is no story here of the kind people expect when a woman says she has a difficult relationship with her mother. She was simply not there, in the way that matters, for any of it.

Not for the year she was eleven, when something happened at school that she has never told anybody about. Not for the day she got the results. Not when the marriage went. There was a phone call about the marriage and her mother talked for most of it about her own back.

So there is a mother, alive and well and forty minutes down the road, and there is also a hole exactly the shape of a mother, and both of those exist at once and there is no word for it.

Other people's mothers come up constantly. Somebody at work rings hers most days. A friend describes an argument with hers and expects sympathy and gets it, and she gives it, and something in her goes quiet for the rest of the afternoon.

At Christmas her mother gave her a candle. It was a perfectly nice candle. She cried in the car and could not have told anybody why, and afterwards told herself off for it, because a candle is not a reason to cry and her mother had not done anything wrong.

That is you, and what you have is a bereavement that nobody will let you call one.

Four things I am not going to do

I am not going to tell you your mother is a bad woman. I do not know her and this page will not be used to prosecute somebody who is not here to answer. She may have had very little given to her. That can be true and it does not fill your hole.

I am not going to tell you to forgive her by Friday. Forgiveness is real and it matters and it is also not a thing that gets produced by an instruction from a stranger, and being told to do it before the loss has even been named is what has kept a great many people stuck for decades.

I am not going to tell you to confront her or to cut her off. Both of those are real options and both belong to you.

And I am not going to tell you to be grateful that she is alive. That sentence has been said to you, probably more than once, and it is the exact thing that closes the subject.

You are not wrong to be grieving. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it does not stipulate that the person you lost has to have died, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a car park after a candle.

The verse for having no one

There is a line in Psalm 142 that is one of the loneliest sentences in the Bible, and it is exactly yours.

I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul.Psalm 142:4

I looked on my right hand. That is the position of a helper, the place you turn to when you need somebody. He looked to the place where the help should be and it was empty.

No man that would know me. Not nobody who could help. Nobody who would know him. That is a different and deeper absence, and it is the one you have. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 142:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

Your mother knows facts about you. She does not know you, and she never set out to, and that is the specific thing that has been missing since you were eleven. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 142:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

And notice that this is in Scripture, spoken to God, without correction. Nobody adds a verse telling him to count his blessings. It stands as an accurate description of a real position, addressed to somebody who was listening.

You are not exaggerating an absence. Scripture says I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me, Psalm 142:4, and it was kept in the book exactly as it was said, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been telling you that it was not that bad.

The candle

Let me stay with the car park, because you told yourself off for it and that was the wrong response entirely.

You did not cry about the candle. You cried because a candle is what you give somebody you do not know, and you had received clear, kind, unmistakable evidence, once again, that after all these years she does not know you.

That is a real loss arriving in a small object, which is how grief almost always arrives. Nobody cries at the funeral and everybody cries at the boiled sweets in the supermarket.

The telling yourself off is the more serious problem. You did it because you have a rule that says this is not allowed to hurt, and the rule has been running so long that you enforce it automatically, in a car, alone, with nobody around who would have argued. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Psalm 142:4, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

Where did that rule come from? Not from God. It came from the absence of anybody to say the obvious thing, which is: of course that hurt.

You are not required to be reasonable about this. Scripture says put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book, Psalm 56:8, and it describes a God who keeps grief rather than assessing whether it was warranted, and the Holy Spirit did not join you in the car park to tell you off.

What you are actually mourning

Here is the thing that will help you most, and it is a correction of what you have been grieving. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Psalm 142:4, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

You are not mourning your mother. She is alive and you see her monthly and that relationship is what it is. Scripture stands under that in Psalm 142:4, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

You are mourning a mother. The one who would have known about the year you were eleven. The one who would have rung on the day of the results. The one who would have said the right thing about the marriage instead of her back. It is written, in Psalm 142:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

That person never existed. She is not somebody your mother could have been if she had tried a bit harder; that is the fantasy that keeps a person going back to the same coffee shop for twenty years hoping this will be the month.

Grieving her is what lets you stop hoping for her.

And that is not despair. It is what makes an actual relationship with your actual mother possible, at whatever size it can be, because you can finally stop asking a woman for something she does not have.

You are not going to be handed what she does not possess. Scripture says when my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up, Psalm 27:10, and it names the specific gap and puts somebody else in it rather than pretending the gap is not there, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that taking up.