Mom vs mother.

It has been minutes since my last post. I am swirling. My brain is backpedaling and I am judging myself. Take it back. Erase. Edit. Rewrite the whole damn thing. Stop writing. Keep it inside. Why did you say that? Why. Just why. What about this?

This is what happens when you do not write for months. The first thing that pops into your mind ends up on the page.

In August I went to visit my daughter. In the last post I questioned whether I would ever be a mother? I am a mom, but I have never been a mother. A mother earns her name and a mom is just a given title. I had never felt like either one until that visit in August. It was the best visit I have ever had and I felt welcomed and connected more so than ever before. I didn’t feel like I was ashamed of myself and that I should hide who I was. This was in part by my daughter introducing me to numerous people as her mom. The first time she did it I thought it was by accident. I fumbled. I paused. I savored the idea of being seen as her mom. My heart grew. I thought it was an accident until she kept doing it, multiple times. Each time she introduced me her enthusiasm grew more and more. With that my heart grew so big I could feel it in my throat. She had called me mama as a baby, but I am sure those were just sounds she was making. I dont know if she knew how important that was to me, but I felt on that day I finally became a mom. This is not to be confused with a mother, because I am still lost on whether I will ever be that.

Even though mom is just a given title, I felt such the opposite of that for so long that hearing it from her mouth really made it true.

I savored this day and I continue to. I have told so many people the story about that day. I wanted to tell my daughter how important that day was to me, but as we have no communication that was not possible.

Until now. She will read this and now she will know that on that day when she introduced me to the world, I finally became a mom.

By default.

So much has happened since I last wrote an entry. I have graduated from University with honours, I went back to school, I bought myself a new car, I visited my daughter, I lived, I breathed. I succeeded in everything that was put in front of me.

There is so much I have wanted to write about but it seems like it is all piling up. The pile of things are too big now and so I ignore them. I sweep them under a rug and I let them stay hidden. These things do not make me sick like they used to. These are just rambling thoughts.

I am in the bath right now and it is so hot that I am sweating. My hands are slippery and yet I still hold my phone clumsily. It is time to write and I am still fumbling to figure out what to start with.

My life maybe, and how everything is just the way it should be. But what does that mean? My life relative to what else? If I compare it to how it was before then things are perfect. Everything is perfect. But there has been a quiet uneasiness within me and I do not know when it started. But it is here and it becomes more. I feel so occupied with my full schedule and yet when it is quiet I feel a loss. I feel like there is something missing.

I am missing something. If I said that I couldn’t quite place my finger on it, then I would be lying. I didn’t think that I could be a mother when I was using, nor when I was first sober. I thought that I would be an awful mother. I pushed it down. I wrote it off because I would never be enough.

Then it started to creep back in, but I thought I had stopped it dead in its tracks. The idea of starting a family this late in life, with no security yet. With no money. That’s it. It is money, because if I won the lottery my dream would be to have a big family, and live in a big house. I would still work of course, but then I would have the financial security that it requires to have children.

I know this is all just a dream to me, but my body is fighting me nearly every day. My instincts are that I should be building a family with children and a future. I only know what my family has done before me, to break that mold feels so strange.

I know that one day I will be a grandmother, by default – but will I ever have the chance to be a mother?