A Mom-Sized Hole

Fifteen years later, I still reach for the phone to call her

My life is divided into two parts—before my mom died and after.

Her death was a splinter in my timeline. I’ve only had a few over the four plus decades I’ve been on this planet, but the magnitude of all the splinters combined was a tiny quake compared to the cracking open of earth that happened when my mother left.

Fifteen years later and my mom is still the first person I want to call. When I ache with loneliness and feel like no one understands me, it’s code for, “I want my mama.” At 43, I still need my mom.

I have so many questions.

Mostly, “How did you do this?” *gesturing around to the never-ending laundry and dishes and the insatiable needs and the resentment and the exhaustion and the overwhelming love, and that deep feeling like I am missing a huge part of my life right now, even though society screams, “Your children are your whole life.”

And, “How did you cope with no longer feeling whole?”

Of course, I know the answer to that one.

She tried to fill the hole with rum and coke and cabbage soup diets and drastic career changes and remodels. She tried to change the outsides to better her insides.

It wasn’t until she got sober that she realized it was a God-sized hole. No substance or entity could fill it –she was already whole and it’s remembering that which is all of our work.

Image by Zach T B from Pixabay

“Don’t be a hungry ghost,” she’d warn me in high school, as I complained endlessly about not getting something I ”needed” (let’s be real: wanted). A Dunhill Menthol cigarette always perched between her perfectly-manicured fingers.

Her sobriety coincided with her deep dive into Buddhism and even though it would be years before I got deep into my own spiritual study, I always appreciated these insights.

I suppose it was a distant cry from the aches of my own God-sized hole which I had tried to starve and punish quiet.

I feel that hole aching again. Louder than ever.

I even hear her, “You’re being a hungry ghost, Sarah.”

I’m greedy with any free moment I get or any burst of creative energy.

It’s like I’m trying to shove years of self-care through a pinhole mouth, only making myself hungrier and angrier.

I wanted to channel her today, to honor her legacy, so I did what I wanted to do for an hour. I let my 5 year old go inside by himself while his wild little brother slumbered—a reprieve for us all—so I could sit alone in our backyard writing and sipping hot tea.

His face is currently plastered against the glass door closest to me making faces like a blowfish.

“What are you doing?,” I ask.

“I’m watching you.”

I remember needing her that much.

I remember her feeling so far away, it was as if she were the one traveling across the Atlantic and not my father, though she was the one always left at home.

I don’t want my kids to miss me while I’m still here.

I try so hard to be attuned and present, but I, too, daydream. I, too, get lost in conversation with friends. I, too, lose myself in my passions. I, too, yearn for more.

I give so much and yet it never feels like enough.

Was that it all along? Is this our lot?

To long for ALL of our mothers, when their work (our work now as moms) is to learn how to both love AND remain whole?

Today, I try to fill myself with my family, my work, and God; but there’s still a mom-sized hole that even they can’t fill.

Even They cannot fill that space.

So, maybe that's it?

The hole we all so desperately seek to fill—whether left by a lost parent, a lost lover, or even God—maybe it's meant to be there…

Maybe it's meant to be this amorphous space of lost love that we grow around. That we grow for.

Maybe it's not meant to be filled at all.

It's meant to be padded, protected. It's meant to define us.

To distinguish us.

Maybe I’m not a hungry ghost. Maybe it’s just my mom-sized hole and it shapes me.