Happy Dead Mom Day #29: This One Hits Different

 

My mother died when she was 40 years old. I turned 40 three months ago. 

This one hits different, but for none of the reasons I would have expected. 

I mean, none of us expected this pandemic, right? So that's a whole flavor to this in and of itself.

I actually grieved this anniversary harder around my birthday. I kept making the joke that it was so kind of the whole world to join me in my midlife existential crisis. Except, I wasn't having an existential crisis about being middle-aged. I was having a midlife crisis about living far longer than my mother ever got to.

Earlier in the year, when we were all young and innocent and under the illuison that plans were ours to make and that we had any control over the future, I was seriously stressing about how to celebrate my 40th birthday. I felt a lot of pressure to make it splashy in my usual way -  get a villa in Italy, Southern France. I had so many friends also turning 40 this summer that I was actually anxious about my travel calendar (hahahahahahaha). And at the same time, I didn't want to celebrate it at all. 

Living further than my mother felt almost tragic. I used to be very afraid that I would also die by age 40.  But also I really wanted to live past 40. Living further than my mother felt both like liberation and a wrenching. It's painful to differentiate from your family, and in this case, if I also died young, there was a perverted logic that made me think, "Well, at least I'd be just like her."

But also, I didn't want to die. But also, I didn't know how to celebrate this milestone, for myself. 

Luckily for me, the pandemic made things stark and clear. I posted up in my apartment during the grim months of March and April in New York.  Travel was impossible. So in May, I held a huge party over Zoom, where people shared their favorite memories of times with me. I ate a really pink cake and drank expensive champagne and decorated my apartment in huge balloons. The next day, it looked like 20 people had partied in my home, but it had been just me, hosting a Zoom rager. I think part of what I liked about it is that it felt like a wedding or a funeral. It had been 8 hours of walking down memory lane. 

It also felt a little like a superpower, to live further than my mother, and survive in the epicenter of a pandemic at the same time. My superpower is that I followed public health guidelines from Big Daddy Cuomo and was happy to wear a nightgown and read Ice Planet Barbarians for weeks on end. These are not the survival skils the books told me I would need, but they worked. 

So here we are at Dead Mom Day.  I have officially outlived my mother. 

It doesn't feel as traumatizing as I worried it might. In another year, if America's democracy weren't on fire and we hadn't lost over 180,000 American lives, and people weren't marching in the streets for their right to live, maybe I'd have more emotional energy to spend on my own personal tragedy. Except I don't have the luxury of only paying attention to my feelings for only one day a year. If I want to live, I have to pay attention to them all of the time.

That's another lesson of the pandemic. We cannot abandon ourselves. It became very clear to me that, as a woman who lived alone while 20,000 people died in her city, my only responsibility is to survive. To keep myself healthy, as best as I can, in mind, body and spirit. This has meant some hard choices, like staying away from my family in Hawai'i, missing the birth of my nephew. It's also meant seeking various forms of help for my anxiety, setting and communicating boundaries, watching my salt, sugar, and booze intake, paying attention to the people and things that make me feel nourished. 

This Dead Mom Day, social media is filled with tributes to Princess Diana. But I am thinking of Prince Harry. I know Harry and Meghan's departure from being working royals was controversial. I think it's brilliant. I think for all that Princess Diana struggled with her mental health, she raised children who take their mental health seriously. I love that Harry and Meghan were in a situation that was untenable, and they said, "No more." Boundaries are hot. Most of all, I love that they have a more expansive vision for their role in the world. 

That's my wish for myself, for the next 40 years. A more expansive vision for my role in the world. I mean, I'm not dying of cancer at age 40, I am surviving a pandemic and I swam in the Hudson River and did not require antibiotics after it. WHAT CAN'T I DO NOW????

This Dead Mom Day I started a new tradition. Mele and I made our mom's French roll-up pancakes together over Facetime. They were delicious, just like we remembered. I wanted to feel "together" with my sister, and we made it happen. 

I couldn't find any photos of my mom when she turned 40. I don't think we took any, because she was so sick. But here is a photo of me, Mele and my mom. My mom is 39 and sending us to summer camp. I'm standing in front of her so the camera doesn't catch the cane she's leaning on. I am 10 years old. The next year I will turn 11 and my mom will turn 40. The year after that,  I'll turn 12, and 13, and 14, and so on until now, when I turn 40 and wear a sparkly jumpsuit and keep on living, and keep on living, and keep on living.

And my 41st birthday party will be a real rager. 

A New Proposal For Mother's Day

Dear Hearts,

Oh joy. It's that time of year again! Thank you capitalism for making sure that every store email list I never subscribed to now sends me a reminder of a way to "treat" myself on Mother's Day. Well, the joke is on them, because my mom is dead but I can still take ruthless advantage of their Mother's Day sales! I got new sheets, new pans, new period panties! Nothing says "celebrate motherhood" like thanking the invisible labor of women by purchasing home goods!! Wheee!

Wow, did it get political around here? Yes, hello. Welcome to 2019. I saw The Handmaid's Tale and Killing Eve, went to a few marches and now I'm super totes radicalized. Wheeeee! (jk, I was radicalized the moment I saw Teen Witch in 1989.)

See, I realized that while Mother's Day does give me complicated feelings, I have also been socially conditioned to multitask and for once I am gonna put that to good use! So, if you have come to this blog for some motherless camaraderie and commiseration, here is some space I will hold for you and all your feels.

BUT, I have a new vision for Mother's Day. My mom is dead and I don't have kids, so why not f*ck shit up?  (Don't worry, there is still brunch.)

WHAT IF...we all reorganized Mother’s Day so it’s brunch + reproductive rights? (Hallmark is charging $9+ for cards now, clearly capitalist holidays have jumped the shark.) What if we stopped making nice...and got hysterical?

Hysteria literally translates to the idea of wandering uteruses. If we weren’t afraid of being called hysterical, what might our uteruses accomplish on behalf of their own freedom? Into what bright new day might they wander? Somewhere there is a future where bodily autonomy, common sense and legislation all co-exist. In the face of current legislation, that future seems so close,  yet so far. It’s almost as hysterical as all the old boyz desperately trying to rein our autonomy in. 

WHAT IF...Mother’s Day was a riot/reclamation/celebration of our right to choose, like a big dance party where we all agree to mind our own business? You don’t need to be a mother to party hardy for that. 

By next year, let’s have figured this out and make new traditions. If there is anything we can learn from the patriarchy, it’s how to co-opt a matriarchal holiday and repurpose it for our own doctrine. (See: Easter, Halloween, everything....)

Let's reframe Mother's Day into a day of hysterical protest! Or at the very least, let's sing the lyrics to Olivia Newton-John's Physical as "Let's get hysterical-sterical! Let me hear your body talk!" 

(I know I'm not the first person to suggest this idea, so let's all work together and get a move on! If you have other resources and ideas, let me know!)

In the meantime, here's what I will be doing this Mother's Day, in the name of reproductive freedom:

• Writing thank you notes to abortion providers. (Thank you to Lady Parts Justice League for inventing the Thank Bank - Lady Parts Justice League: https://lpjleague.org/thankbank/)
• Making a Mother's Day Card for Georgia's Governor Kemp. 
• Watching The Resistance Revival Chorus on repeat: https://www.facebook.com/ResistanceRevivalChorus/?__tn__=*s-R
• Donating money
• Reading stuff & getting educated from resources like:

• https://www.abortioncarenetwork.org
• https://www.aclu.org/issues/reproductive-freedom
• https://www.rhavote.com/
• https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/
• https://www.equalrightsamendment.org

My mom is dead, but I still have plenty of time to fight.

Happy Mother's Day. May all our bodies be our own.

Love,

Laura

P.S. Let us not forget the great Mother's Day Blessing of this royal baby:

~

I don't always write about dead moms, but I love it when I do. I am an author, podcast host, Fairy Boss Mother and creativity coach.  Sign up for my mailing list, and I'll make sure you know about everything else I do. I spend way too much time on Instagram.

Mother's Day Is a Bummer...So Let's Talk About Something Else

If it's near Mothers' Day and you're feeling mad/sad, you have come to the right place. Here is where I hold space for you to be angry at the over-commercial overwhelmingness of celebrating a day that reminds you that your mom is gone. Or reminds you that you miss your baby. Or reminds you that the patriarchy is hell bent on convincing you that you can’t fully express yourself without having a baby.

Mother’s Day is a bummer.  Go ahead, wallow. I got you.

But if this year, you are looking for something different, I also got you.

Let's talk about mermaids and our matrilineal line.

Last week, I returned to mermaid camp and spent many days dipping in the fountain of youth, basking in the company of boss-sauce older broads who know all the secrets of life. It's a sorority of sirens. It was also an inter-generational gold mine of knowledge, love and community.

"Try to swim upstream," they said, and laughed when I wore myself out swimming to nowhere.

"Now, hike up the sandbar, and float back to us."

So I mermaid-crawled through the sun-sparkled crystal-clear current, exerting no energy, letting myself be carried and supported by spring water that had shot through a vent that had been shaped into a spiral over the past million-or-so years. When I was finished floating, I put my feet down and let the river push against my belly as it rushed past me. It was never going to end. It would flow around me forever.  I thought, This feels like love. 

The spring water came from a place so deep within the earth, it might be a hundred years old by the time it reached me. That also feels like love.

When we have a complicated relationship to mothers/motherhood, it can feel like we have somehow been cheated or robbed of the amount of love we were supposed to garner in our lifetime. Some part of us has been cut off. When it comes to mother-love, we are like toddlers with no sense of object permanence. If we can't see them, can we prove that they love us still? Does our love for them cease to be significant when we have no physical presence to lavish it upon?

After mermaid camp, I laid on my acupuncturist’s table, waterlogged and dreamy, trying to settle my inner ear and ground myself from swimming off into the deep blue forever.

I thought about my grandmother, and her mother. In my meditation, I thought of their love like liquid gold, filling a bucket and pouring down a trough into the next generation, like a Rube Goldberg machine of maternal affection. At each generation, my ancestors stopped to pick out the impurities, the sticks and rocks that clouded the gold, removing their burdens and passing onto me their love, their talents, their wealth, their devotion. At the bottom, I swam in a large cauldron of gold, dunking the roots of my ideas in their gold and planting an orchard of golden shower trees. Here is everything we have. Make something, they said.

Before you were born, your mother's mother loved you. Before you were born, your great-grandmother loved you. Before you were born, your great-grandmother's great-grandmother loved you. And on and on and on and on, back to the time when we were dust hitchhiking on an asteroid.

Without knowing when you would arrive, or who you would become, they loved you. Somewhere deep in your DNA, there are molecules of love from generations past that carry that love, anchoring it in the deepest core of your being. You can lose an arm, a leg, a job, a spouse, a credit rating, a house, even your dignity. They will love you still.

Generations past, through whatever fortune and misfortune your ancestors mucked through, YOU were the hope, the spark of an idea, the thing they toiled for, the person they loved although they would never meet you.

Love is a time-traveller. Like ancient starlight, it is shining down on you today.

I thought about the river. What wars had I been raging unnecessarily? Where had I been "swimming upstream" when all I had to do was let myself be held? When is it my job to hike to meet the current, and when is it my job to float?

I have a therapist who is so kind sometimes I wonder if what she is doing is therapy, or just being incredibly nice. It doesn't matter. Kindness is rehabilitative. One day, I cried on her couch while she sang me a lullaby. It was cheesy, and I wanted to argue with the song. Instead, I relaxed. I let myself be carried by her kindness.


Back to those mermaids I swam with in the ancient spring, and a secret I learned from the fountain of youth.

At some point, we experienced love as a deluge. We think if we aren't near the source, then it doesn't exist. That's like fighting the current. The truth is that you have always been loved, and continue to be loved, by forces unseen, unknown and yet to come.

Your job is to float. Your job is to open to kindness, and pass that down river. Your job is to make something of what your ancestors rain down upon you.

The best thing to make out of love is more of the same.

Happy Mother's Day to all you love-makers.

***

I don't always write about dead moms, but I love it when I do. I am the Fairy Boss Mother of Cinderly, a romance novelist and a transformational coach.  Sign up for my mailing list, and I'll make sure you know about everything else I do.

Happy Dead Mom Day: Other Sh*t We Inherit

Happy Dead Mom Day! It's a big one, kittens. It's #26 for me, and it's #20 for Prince William and Prince Harry. Happy Dead Mom Day to my #1 royal boos.

Today, I want to talk about all the stuff we inherit that doesn't fit in a storage unit. Remember my storage unit? Cleaning that out uncovered a whole dust storm of emotional baggage I didn't even know I was carrying! Because it was invisible! My mom itemized all the family china but no one gave me a purchase order for all the feelings that came with it! Wild, right?

So, now I go to thurrr-apy. That's when you go to therapy but you are embarrassed to let people know that you are reckoning with the tendermost parts of your life, so you call it "thurrr-apy" so it sounds like syrup and therefore goes down sweeter.

A post shared by Laura von Holt ✨ (@lauravonholt) on Jul 3, 2017 at 4:18am PDT

I also went to the exhibit of Diana's dresses at Kensington Palace. Wow, Prince William and Prince Harry's dead mom storage unit is A++ double luxury! They have a lot more people to help them sift through the her stuff. I hope they have someone to help them sift through the invisible shit too.

I liked looking at all the beading, and the sequins, and remembering that one time Princess Diana danced with John Travolta. The exhibit was airy, well-lit, orderly. That is not usually the case with our internal life.

Here are some things you might have packed inside your emotional baggage:

1. reactionary habits
2. behavioral patterns
3. your pain
4. your ancestors' pain
5. shame
6. guilt
7. rage
8. rage
9. rage
10. fear
11. more rage

If, like me, you carry these things, baby, you are packing some intense heat! Like Game of Thrones ice dragon heat! Damn, girl!

But since you are an ice dragon, you can melt the ice wall that is keeping you from your freest self.



You didn't select this emotional baggage. You filled this internal storage unit with stuff from other people. This stuff was given to you by people who thought they were protecting you, or who were protecting themselves. Sometimes we are just the bystanders when other people are working out their shit. Sometimes that shit got worked out on us. Sometimes we hold onto that shit so we can stay close to the people we love.

It is hard to lose people. It is also hard to give away what you don't need. But it cuts to keep it, like snuggling a teddy bear made of chainsaws.

Will, Harry, strangers on the internet, we're not keeping stuff anymore, mmkay?

Just like I gave away two dozen fine dining sets to charity, we can release all the other stuff too. I don't motherfucking care if that china was hand-painted in Italy, the emotional pattern doesn't work for me, OKAY! (I kept the champagne glasses. Their sweetness will do just fine.) Let the rest go, even when your fingers ache to call it all back.

Konmari your emotional storage. What does not spark joy, what no longer works for your life, give it away. Surrender it to the the sky, or dump the haggard monsters and dust bunnies of your heart into the ocean, like ashes, let it float away.

Hand back the pain they burdened us to carry.

You might have a moment of regret, watching it go. It is easier to let the rain fall on us than make the effort to fix the roof.

It's important that we do fix the roof. It was leaking, for fuck's sake.

You can live with a full heart. You can forge new tools, learn new customs. Invent the love you want. Build from mud the home, village, heart that can truly shelter you.




One more story:

I had rough day earlier this summer. I picked two goddess cards: Vesta and Guinevere.

The message: clean your house, love is coming.

Oh god, I thought. Do I have to mop? And reactivate my match.com account?

In the shower, the answer came to me.

Clean your emotional house, self-love is coming.

Move through the dark and dusty corners. Make room for the light to shine in.



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Happy Dead Mom Day #25: Going Dark

Happy Dead Mom Day #25! Our mom has been dead for so long, she could rent a car! WHERE IS MY CORPORATE SPONSORSHIP? I'm looking at you, Avis, Alamo, Hertz, whomever! My mom died, I should get a free car!

Today I was going to write you a long post about things I've been thinking about since we cleaned out my mom's storage unit. BUT, I'm not going to do that this year. This year, my sister and I are going dark.

What is going dark? I don't know. I just know that my sister saw it on Gilmore Girls. I guess Luke takes a day every year and disappears and that day is also the anniversary of his father's death. We agreed that this is a fantastic plan, and so today, WE ARE GOING DARK.

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Obviously the best way to honor your feelings is to copy something you saw on TV. Solid thinking. Super. Duper. Solid.

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(No, not Poldark, GOING dark.)

It's actually very hard to take a Dark Day. We are both super busy boss ladies with a lot of commitments and responsibilities. Other people, and even ourselves, will try to convince us to arrange our dark day to a more convenient time. But that is the whole point.

Death cannot be rescheduled. Grief has its own timetable. Leave us alone, our mom is dead.

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There is another point. We were children when we lost our mom. We followed what the adults thought was best, and we coped as best as we could. Now, as grown-ass women, we can mourn and cope however we want to. Maybe we will wear caftans. Maybe we will wear pink lipstick. Maybe we will organize bookshelves. If the weather reports are true, one of us may be hunkering down through a tropical hurricane. Maybe we will get drunk. Maybe we will listen to Tina Turner. Maybe we will light candles. Maybe we will just be dark.

Maybe it will be dramatic. Maybe it won't. Whatever it is, our mom is dead, and we're doing this our way.


Royal Report: Happy Dead Mom Day, Prince Harry and Prince William!  Prince Harry is also sad. We should go to therapy together. And by therapy, I mean a castle in Scotland where we lie by the fire lick champagne off of each other's bodies. That sounds like a great plan for Dark Day.

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This is totally how I would grieve with Prince Harry.

Mothering for the Motherless on Mother's Day

Hello, dear.

I see you, squinting through the blue glare of your screen. Perhaps you found me by Googling, "I have a dead mom." Perhaps you googled "dead mom + Mother's Day." Or perhaps you are one of my 5 devoted fans who checks this blog on my twice annual Official Days of Posting: Mother's Day, and Happy Dead Mom Day. (Protip: the exact way NOT to have a successful blog is to only post twice a year, but my mom is dead, so I run my life however I want to.) Anyway, however you found yourself here, welcome!

If you have lost your mom, or for any reason Mother's Day makes you sad, angry, bereft, vengeful, anti-social, depressed, rage-filled or baffled, or any combination of those feelings, this place is for you. Here, I will even hold some space for all of your complicated feelings:



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Was that enough space? No? Okay, here is some more:




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Better? I hope so. Now let's get on with what I want to say in honor of this Mother's Day.

1) It turns out, writing twice annually about your dead mom is not a comprehensive mental health plan. Therefore, I have begun going to therapy. I love it. I love my therapist. I love that she is appropriately awed by the epic scope of my personal history and feelings. Once a week, I go to her office and let my teary, befuddled, complex freak flag fly.

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Therapy is good. Go get some. I also like tarot, acupuncture, restorative yoga, goddess circles, naps and a finely chilled rosé drunk at a bustling sidewalk café. Go get yourself some healing, friend. Leave the desert island you have strapped yourself to and seek out what nourishes you. Grow those seeds into mountains. Climb those mountains. Feast on the possibilities of your life.


2) What is terrible about losing a mother is that there is first absence, second adaptation. We become accustomed to not feeling mothered. It is painful. It is a secondary kind of grief. We become angry when we realize this part of our lives is gone. We are jealous of those who have it. We remember it, and yet we forget what it feels like.


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But it doesn't have to be this way.

Last Thanksgiving, I attended a "Friendsgiving" dinner. My host's mother was there, cooking 20 pounds more turkey than we could eat. At the end of the night, she sent me home with a grocery bag full of leftovers. "Wait a few minutes," she said, disappearing back into the kitchen. I didn't request my Uber. She returned, carrying a Tupperware full of fresh gravy that she had whipped up in those moments, just for me. I felt mothered.

I taught my dad how to use Facetime on his new iPhone. On my birthday, my dad and my stepmother used Facetime to call me. They peered into the screen, delighted and baffled to see my face. Usually, we only come face-to-face a few times a year. How wonderful to see their daughter, any day they liked. They love to see my face. I felt mothered.

I teach a creativity and mindfulness program. We spend a whole week practicing being in the moment, intentional about our time, finding ways to slow down and more fully experience our present moment. One of my students said she turned her nightly face-washing into an exercise in mindfulness, washing her face with devotion and care. That night, as I rushed through applying my face cream, I realized that I wasn't "applying" anything; I was spending 15 seconds a day slapping myself on the face. I slowed down, traced my forehead, my eyebrows, my nose. I stroked the cream across my cheekbones, and I cried. When was the last time anyone touched me gently on my face? When was the last time I treasured myself, my Self? When was the last time I marveled that I existed at all? I see my friends marvel at the wonder of their children, snuggled near them. Aren't I a marvel too?

A long time ago, my mother marveled at me. Somewhere, she marvels still. A nice lady made me special gravy. My family loves me. When I marvel at myself, when I grow what nourishes me into mountains, when I climb those mountains and marvel at the wonders of my life, I mother myself.

You can do it too.

*****

I don't always write about dead moms, but I love it when I do. I am the Fairy BossMother of Cinderly, a romance novelist and a transformational coach.  Sign up for my mailing list, and I'll make sure you know about everything else I do.

Happy Dead Mom Day #24: A Message From Beyond

Some years are uneventful on the dead mom front. Just the customary abandonment issues and fears of an untimely death. You know, the usual. But some years, they Kick. Your. Ass. Good thing I had declared 2015 to be the year of the Grown Ass Woman, because I am here to do some Grown Ass Shit.

On January 1^st, 2015, I woke up to find that somewhere between my third and ninth glass of champagne on New Year's Eve, I had emailed myself this mysterious message:

Bakarw980120. I took this to mean that sometime in the evening, I had resolved to book a session with my mystic to the stars, Bakara Wintner.  (BTW, I am the “stars” to which Bakara is a mystic. I mean, maybe she has other celebrity clients, but I am the star, obviously.) So Bakara came to my house, and gave me and my other aerial half, super famous sex icon Erin Clark, some uh-mazing readings.  Bakara dropped a lot of truthbombs and realness in the form of a beautifully illustrated and intuitive tarot reading full of grown ass woman shit. Bakara also brought a message from the beyond. “Your mother has a message for you, but she’s not going to give it to me. She wants you to talk to her.”

Guess how many things I will do to avoid a supernatural summons from my mother? All the things! I cleaned my apartment, you guys! I scrubbed the baseboards with organic lavender soap! I opened all my mail! I crossed off errands that had been on my to-do list since 2008!  And in all this avoidance activity, I found the thing my mom wanted to talk to me about. And I did not want to talk about it. At all.

"It" was a set of cassette tapes my mom had recorded before she died, and I had been hiding them in my desk for about seven years. I did not want to listen to them. What if they held information I couldn’t handle? What if she told me I wasn’t really her daughter, that I’d been switched at birth, or that she knew on which date the world was going to end, or that Prince William was actually my secret brother so our future marriage would be a case of incest, and not in a creepy-hot Flowers in the Attic way? What if listening to those tapes was more painful than losing her? No wonder I wanted to AVOID ALL THE THINGS!

A few days later, I was thinking about my mom when I passed a sign that had her name on it, in hot pink lettering. Fine, Mom, if you’re going to write it in pink, I will go home and listen to your stupid tapes. UGH. So, somewhere in the dregs of my apartment, I found an old Walkman, and some batteries, and I snot-cried all over everything while I tried to remember how to rewind a cassette tape. WHY MUST MY GRIEF BE SO ANALOG???? And I listened to the tapes. One was a sweet, rambling oral history of our family in which she revealed several things that I will most definitely put in a novel. And the second tape, which I feared would contain the real bomb, was actually THE BOMB. It was a tape full of Tina Turner’s country album from 1974, plus assorted hits circa 1986. That was my mom’s message from beyond.

My dead mom was on a roll, so she didn’t stop there. She sent me some diamond rings in the mail, rings I had left at a jeweler for 7 years, for, I don’t know, safe keeping? Let’s be real, I did not leave them at the jewelers for safe keeping, I left them because I did not want to deal with my shit.  Then, a few months later, I received what I like to call “My Box of Feelings” – a random package from my brother which contained the journals my mom kept while she was pregnant with me. Did I hide that box under my bed? No, I sat down, and I read those journals.  I dealt with my shit, and I learned about 40 million things which I will also put in a novel. The title of this novel, BTW, will be “Shit So Crazy I Can’t Make It Up So I Pretended It Was Fiction,” and I will sell it on Amazon for $7.99, so you should get Amazon Prime now so you can get that book shipped to you for free.

Since my dead mom had done such an excellent job of preparing me to deal with my shit, and showing me the rewards inherent in dealing with my shit, like diamond rings, expanded musical knowledge and a gold mine of  “artistic inspiration,” I decided it was time to deal with the real shit: my mother’s storage unit. For about 14 years, my siblings and I have shared a storage unit of stuff a moving company had packed for us, full of our mom’s belongings. We didn’t really even know what was in there, but I kept paying the bill for it because writing checks is easier than dealing with my shit.  But no longer! I am a Grown Ass Woman!! So I flew to Hawai’i, and my little sister and I rented a U-Haul, and we dealt with our mom’s shit.

Grown Ass Women drive big vans using their muscles and mermaid powers.

You know what’s a lot?  Physically handling your dead mom’s shit after 24 years.  I mean, if you want an exercise in sifting through what matters to you, store a bunch of sentimental items for a few decades, and then physically unwrap every piece of it and see how you feel about it then. I graduated from a box of feelings to a storage unit of feelings. And my primary feeling was this: Who needs this shit????? So we gave it all away. Except for the good silver. We sold that so we can shop at Anthropologie.

At 3am the following morning, I woke up in a panic. Because I gave all my mom’s shit away. I dealt with her shit, and then I threw it all away. See, what I had been storing in that unit was the idea that maybe someday, I could be surrounded by her things again, and then I would be surrounded by her again. But that time has passed. That place is no more. And twelve boxes of wedding china cannot bring her back to me.  But I can wear her rings, and look at her pictures, and read her journals, and feel my feelings, because that is where she lives now. We carry the people we love with us, we are their forever home.

So, to the Princes William and Harry, and to the rest of us on this Dead Mom Day, I want to tell you that if you are storing a Buckingham Palace full of your shit, empty it out. Deal with it. You will find a few treasures, but most of it you don’t need. Take the things that no longer serve you, thank them for whatever comfort they brought you, then donate the good stemware so someone else can use it, and throw out the rest.

Princess Diana says deal with your shit so you have room to dance!

We are only on this planet for so long, and we must keep our spaces clear for the real valuables, for the things that are actually precious to us. Like a bomb-ass Tina Turner tape.

***

I don't always write about dead moms, but I think it's fun when I do. If you want to see what else I have going on, follow me on Twitter or Facebook.