Girouard
my head, whispering that there will be no call tonight, nor tomorrow, nor…but my heart refuses to listen. Surely, it cannot go this far. Surely, all the “good,” for there was so much and is so much good between us, must outweigh any “bad.” We’d had disagreements, even arguments, okay, so what? Mothers and daughters clash all the time, and there is (or should be) security in knowing that whatever words are exchanged in anger are ultimately diminished by the strength of the mother-daughter bond. My own mother and I had frequently disagreed, the arguments sometimes passionate and hurtful. At times, I resented what I interpreted as her interference. I was nothing like her; how could she relate to how I was feeling or what I was going through? I was my own person, not an extension of her! “This is not about you!” I would scream in a frustration that would turn to incredulity at her calm response: “Everything about you is about me.” Yet whatever was said between us, whatever differences lay unresolved, I could not imagine my life without her. When she was dying and I was in the middle of a divorce, I was terrified of losing what (only through maturity) I had come to realize was her support, her protection, her unconditional love, the only unconditional love that I had truly ever received, would ever receive, for the only unconditional love that exists in this world is that of a mother for her child. How would I walk the road ahead without the reassurance that, when needed, that emotional support I’d too often taken for granted would be there? Who else would take my side no matter what the circumstances, vicariously empathize with both my anger and joy, and patiently listen to my stories as she had throughout the first thirty six years of my life? Only twenty-one and in an unhappy marriage with a four year old son when her own mother had unexpectedly died, my mother had never gotten over the loss. As a child, I would hear her grief and see it in her eyes whenever she spoke of my grandmother, and even though I had never met this woman, revered nearly to sainthood by her daughter, a woman whose death had occurred nearly twenty years before my birth, I recognized the sometimes terrible bond that exists between mother and daughter and knew that someday I too would feel that same kind of grief. Now after fourteen years, barely a day goes by when I don’t think of my mother and miss her. I’ve woken with a start, imagining 38 | Embodied Effigies