wave

A few days ago, we sent our eldest off to camp for a month. After she’d gone, I was having one of those “what the hell were you thinking?” parenting moments. I’m not so good at goodbyes at the best of times. But to be fair, I didn’t know that this goodbye would be coming so close on the heels of the biggest goodbye I’ve ever had to say.

My mother died two weeks ago.

My grief is enormous.

My grief is a rogue wave, rising out of the ocean and knocking me down, leaving me gasping for breath. If I didn’t have all these children playing on the beach, it would be tempting to let it pull me out to sea and drift for a while.

Almost everything makes me think of my mother. I’m chopping cilantro to put in a salad and I think of how she would send me out to the garden to pick specific herbs and when I returned she’d put them in a glass measuring cup and hand me a pair of kitchen scissors and tell me to chop. A Beatles song comes on the shuffle and I think of how she liked Ringo best, and how she would tell us they were from Liverpool, like her father. I read something in the paper or in a book that I want to tell her about or get her opinion on and the wave rises again.

I suppose with time I will become more accustomed to it. It will hit with less impact, or I will become stronger. I don’t know.

She was a force, my mum.