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.

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.

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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.

Happy Dead Mom Day #22: Can You Turn Into Your Mother Even If She's Dead?

Happy Dead Mom Day #22, everybody! To those ladies who, in the desperate hours of the night entered "dead mom" into their Google search bars, welcome. Lay your head on my heaving bosom and stay awhile. There's no need to pretend anything here. In fact, we prefer it if you're gleefully unhinged. Shhhh...there you are now, you're so pretty.

Our mom has been dead for twenty-two years. Our dead mom could graduate from dead mom college! That's a big life transition, just like dying! Speaking of transitions, I'm sending a very Happy Dead Mom Day to Princess Diana, who must be very busy rearranging the stars to spell "Prince Georgie Forever!" I'd also like to take this opportunity to congratulate Kate and Will on the birth of my first stepchild. I'm a little obsessed with the royals, and our dead mom connection, but look at this picture:

My stepson's first family portrait! His mom is not dead, good for him!

That hair! Those dogs! I'm thinking I'll just screw going after the crown, knock Will out of the way, settle down happily at the palace with Kate, and spend the rest of my life reading paranormal romance novels aloud with my face buried in her hair while the baby and the dogs play at our feet. Then on Dead Mom Day, I'll write out these blog posts on a scroll and have the town crier read them from the palace steps. It will be a beautiful life.

Now that Wills has a baby, the pressure is off! I wonder what my own dead mom is thinking about the royal baby. Is she looking at her stopped watch, shaking her head at me and whispering, "Tick, tock. Tick, tock." Or is she too busy turning cartwheels on the moon with Mae West to care that I haven't yet brought forth fruit from my womb to turn my dead mom into a dead grandmom? What are my dead mom's feelings on progeny?

I am 33 years old (thank you, I know I look good!), which means I am in my Jesus Year (because Jesus was 33 when he died...and was resurrected, depending on your belief system). According to Google, a Jesus Year is also an opportunity for transformation and magical thinking, which I decided to accelerate by going on a vision quest and doing one new thing a day. So, on the themes of transformation and dead moms, today I am wondering: can I turn into my mother, even if she's dead?

Jesus had a mother. Was he worried about turning into her?

Apparently turning into one's mother is a thing that happens, and a lot of people seem afraid of it. I don't know why turning into one's mother is a bad thing. It seems to involve elaborate organization systems for tupperware and taking all the individually-sized jam packets from the diner "because they're free," but otherwise it seems pretty harmless. But if your mom is dead, can you turn into her? Is it even safe to do so? How can you turn into a person whose memory fades in and out - sometimes she's a flickering shadow, a cool breeze felt behind your ears, and sometimes she's a hurricane,  a visceral recollection that knocks you to the floor while you cry out, "I don't have a mom!" How can you turn into that? How can you survive turning into that? 

Here are ways I am turning into my dead mom:

1. Wearing big sunglasses and pink lipstick.
2. Telling inappropriate jokes at inappropriate times.

Here are ways I am not turning into my dead mom:

1. Still alive.
2. Not a mom.

What does turning into your dead mom mean? And does it involve either being a mom or dying like your mom? Here's the thing about being a 33-year old daughter of a dead mom who is also in her prime childbearing years: I'm a year past the age my mom was when she had her last child, five-ish years* from the age when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and seven-ish years from the age she was when she died. Here's another fun fact about having a dead mom who died of breast cancer: when you are ten years from the age your mom was when she was diagnosed, they start intensively pre-screening you for cancer. Since I was 28, I've thrown myself under a wide variety of screening devices - the kinds of machines where I sadly have to leave my oversized earrings in the changing room and bring with me only my courage and a surprisingly good recall of Mariah Carey lyrics. The closer I get to my mom's age-at-diagnosis, the more intense it gets. I'm five years out from "D-Day," and sometimes I wonder if that tick-tock I hear is my biological clock or my countdown to cancer-town. 

The thing is, if I have the same dance with destiny as my mom, shouldn't I get busy living, making babies, winning prizes, and generally smashing my legacy like wedding cake onto the face of the world? If I make it to the age of 41, I will have outlived my mother. At which point I can breathe a sigh of relief, but my eggs will be cooked. It will be "safe" for me to be alive for my children, but a bit on the late side to have said children. As the unfettered bachelorette that I am, what kind of gamble do I make? Have a kid and hope I don't die like my mom did? Do I start charting my ovulation cycle like a grown-up, or hide in a corner until my 42nd birthday and wait for it all to be over? Or do I take a full bottle of whiskey into a bar full of sailors and let fate decide? I'm kidding. I'd only walk into a bar full of firemen, obviously.

So there it is, the annual question I ask on Dead Mom Day, and the annual re-commitment to myself and my life. The question: Do I live my life worrying about my dead mom, or do I just live my life? I don't feel like being sad this year. I'm a little annoyed that I even remember this anniversary. But I'll take this occasion as an excuse to get a pedicure, and then get on with my life. In the gentle moments when my mother's memory hangs like a faint shadow, I remember mainly that she was really good at being alive, and that she loved me. So I don't feel like being sad. I feel like having a good time, because I'm still alive, and a lot of people love me.

My mom loves me, even if she's dead.

********

*My sister and I are really bad at dead mom math. We can never remember exactly how old she was when she died, and every year I have to call my sister the day before Dead Mom Day and remind her, "Don't be sad now. Save it for tomorrow."

Happy Dead Mom Day #21

Happy Dead Mom Day, Prince Harry!

Okay, maybe putting a picture of naked Prince Harry on your blog about your dead mom is not the most polite or respectful thing to do, but it's my dead mom day and I'll celebrate like I want to. You see, as I mentioned last year, our dead mom day is the same as Prince Harry and Prince William's dead mom day. Yes, Princess Diana and our mom died on the same day, several years apart. And like I said last year, I've always felt like there were all these bizarre connections between us and Princess Diana and her poor motherless princes. For instance, Princess Diana and my mom look alike, Princess Diana and I like the same chocolates and I ate a whole box of them the night our mom died, and Princess Diana and our mom have the same dead mom day. (Also, one time I danced booty-to-booty with Prince William, but that's another story.) And then, last week I was having a marvelously shit-tastic day (which is funny because my dead mom days are never that shit-tastic, but wow was this day I had full of emotional shit-storms). So in the middle of this emotional shit-storm, I turned to Twitter for solace and distraction, and what did I see? Naked pictures of Prince Harry!!! How did he know that this is exactly what I needed???? Thank you, Harry!!!! The shit-storm clouds drifted away and all I could see was rainbows, unicorns, and a grainy shadow of some royal dong. We are never alone, people, never. Not even in our darkest moments. If you have a dead mom, the Universe will always send you presents.

So, this morning, I realized it was dead mom day, and I wanted to call Prince Harry and thank him for sending that naked picture into the Universe so it could come to me. But that's ridiculous, I can't call William or Harry because I don't have their phone number, even though we share EVERYTHING else. So, I will put this into the Universe and hope it reaches them through the Dead Mom Coconut Wireless:

Dear William and Harry, Happy Dead Mom Day! If you ever want to hang out on our Dead Mom Day, I would be totally down to eat hamburgers and drink champagne and talk about our dead moms. And if you want to do any of that naked, I'm okay with that too. Love, Laura p.s Call me maybe! (I can't wait to read that joke next year and then facepalm myself.)

I think this just shows what a gentleman Harry is, protecting the lady from the camera. Our moms may be dead, but chivalry is not.

So, what are we doing for dead mom day? Well, first of all, Mele thought yesterday was dead mom day, and she texted me to wish me a happy dead mom day. When I told her that she had the wrong day, she was pissed because she'd already spent a whole day mourning. I understand. It's exhausting mourning your dead mom, and it's just poor time management to spend two whole days doing it. Like, how are we supposed to go to the gym and remember to pay the electricity bills??? We have a dead mom! We are busy!!!!!

Our mom has been dead so long that now she's 21, so of course I wanted to go to Vegas to celebrate, and this was even before I knew there might be a chance of seeing naked princes in Vegas. Now that I know Prince Harry might be swinging in his birthday suit, I want to go to Vegas all the time!!! When I told Mele we should go to Vegas, she replied, "I am unemployed and I live with my dad. Now is not the time for me to go to Vegas." She is so responsible. Harry lives with his dad too, but he still went to Vegas. I really think people shouldn't give Harry a hard time for all his Vegas partying. Sometimes moms die, and sometimes you gotta play pool naked. I get it, Harry, I GET IT! Anyway, I am not going to Vegas. I am going to some rooftop and I am going to drink cocktails. And Mele is pretending that dead mom day was yesterday.

Last year on dead mom day, my friend Liz heard that I was alone, and so she came over to my house, dressed as what she interpreted my dead mom would look like, and brought me flowers and coconut water. It was really beautiful. Not everyone can be visited by Floridian Tropical Dead Mom Barbie on their dead mom day, and I am supremely grateful to the Universe for always directing me towards the right people for my tribe.

Liz as my Floridian Tropical Dead Mom Barbie.
Rule #1 of having a dead mom: Find your tribe. If you can't have a mom, have good people.

Also, here is my anniversary tribute to Prince William and Kate, performed on aerial silks. And by "tribute" I mean, "sorrowful remembrance of the day I realized I would have to be Prince William's SECOND wife." Is it incest if you marry the son of your dead mom's kindred spirit twin person?

Happy Dead Mom Day, everybody!
May love, light and other worlds surround you.

(Images: TMZ)

Happy Dead Mom Day #20

Happy Dead Mom Day!

Our dead mom has been dead for 20 years. That means our dead mom has been a dead mom for half as long as she was a living mom. Whoa! Our dead mom is way dead.

So, what did we do this dead mom day? Well, Mele texted me to ask if I knew that Princess Diana's dead mom day is the same as our dead mom day. Of course I know that! I remember because I was at one of my high school dance's thinking, This is totally weird that my dead mom has been dead for 6 years and I'm at a dance and [Fartface v. 1997] won't ask me to slow dance! Then someone said, OMG Princess Diana just died! And then I was sad because I kind of thought of our dead mom as being the same as Princess Diana, and now there were two dead moms, and I didn't have William or Harry's phone number to tell them that my dead mom would look out for their dead mom.

See, when our dead mom was a living mom, she and I talked about Princess Diana a lot. Actually, they looked very similar - dark blond hair, big blue eyes, ability to wear a tiara on Tuesdays, etc. One time, my mom bought me a box of chocolate-covered cherries at the grocery store because she'd read that Princess Diana liked them too. It just so happens that someone had brought me a box of chocolate-covered cherries a few days before our mom died. After my step-dad woke me up to tell me that our mom had died, I remember picking up the box of chocolate-covered cherries and eating a lot of them, and feeling comforted that at least, in my darkest hours, I could stress-eat just like Princess Diana. That is sad and gross, but so is having a dead mom, and I can narrate the E! True Hollywood story of my life as it happens to me however I want to. Anyway, to re-cap, our dead mom looks like Princess Diana, our dead mom gave me Princess Di's favorite candy, and then, a few years later, I met Prince William in a pub and he hit on my best friend, and then Prince William married Kate Middleton just a 2 days before my birthday, and on my birthday I wore a Zac Posen for Target dress, and if my dead mom were a living mom, she would totally wear a knockoff of whatever Zac Posen dress Princess Di was wearing, if Princess Di were a living princess and not a dead princess. And then, on my birthday, Osama Bin Laden became a dead terrorist instead of a living terrorist, and we still don't know who killed Princess Diana, so you see, IT'S ALL RELATED! Kind of.

Anyway, back to how we celebrated our 20th Dead Mom Day. Well, Mele hasn't done anything yet. She's busy finishing work so she can go on vacation and visit me and see my big aerial silks performance, celebrating the end of my one-year challenge to learn aerial silks. What did I do for this Dead Mom Day? Well, you'll never believe it, but Apple gave me a new iPhone! Just for having a dead mom! I know! It's great, right? Just kidding. They didn't give me a new iPhone because I have a dead mom, they gave me a new iPhone because the first one they gave me was a piece of crap and it was broken, and pretty soon I was gonna have a dead iPhone and a dead mom. Phew! Glad we avoided that tragedy!

But in all seriousness, Mele and I keep wondering how we should mark these dead mom days. Should we make a bucket list and cross something off each year? Should we run marathons for breast cancer (ha!)? Should we get a mammogram so we don't become dead moms too? (Too late, I had my mammogram in April.) Or do we dress up really fancy and do fancy things, because our dead mom was way fancy, and our dead grandma was even fancier, and Princess Diana was the absolute fanciest, and their cocktail party in heaven is absolutely hopping today, so maybe we should try to replicate some of that back here on Earth? Or do we just keep on doing our thing, being awesome, loving our dead mom and living large? Just because we've got a dead mom doesn't mean we have to live like we have a dead mom, right? Happiness and sadness are two sides of the same coin, and I like to save all my change and cash it in for mani-pedis and prosecco.

p.s. This weekend I was in a gay wedding. My dead mom would have really liked my glittery bridesmaid shoes. Dead Moms for Marriage Equality!