Home seems to be wherever Mother was. I have lived more places than I can remember. The only true roots I have ever had, is that place and space where my mothers were.
I met my birth mother in time to celebrate my 60th birthday and her 90th. So appropriate. I wish I could describe that day when my siblings walked me into the common room of her care home. I was afraid to go in. I held back and let my daughter put her arm around me. I am safe with her. I am terrified of abandonment again and again and again for I have been abandoned by this woman once.
I never felt any animosity towards her. She was like a fairy godmother we learned about and I dreamed of when I was a troubled child. She was someone who gave me the greatest gift I think a mother could give. She gave me the opportunity to be given to a sorrowing mother who had just lost her baby. I was a replacement and so was she. We both new abandonments. Her newborn baby died in her arms and here I was, as needy as a baby could be, malnourished, with rickets, crossed eyes, back of my head flat from laying in a place where abandoned baby’s live until someone just as needy was given to me and me to her. She spoke, often, of how frail I was when the nurse handed me to her from the train that brought me down to her. I wa six months old and weighed 11 pounds. I was a nonthriver. She said, “I thought, oh no, I am going to lose another baby.” Imagine how diligently she made sure that I would live.
She would not let anyone take my photograph until she knew I was going to live, afterall. There is a first photograph taken of me where I am looking at my mother, off to the side, with absolute joy and love.
Yes, home will always be where she was and only there, until her death (another abandonment) until, my birth family found me and I had another mother, another home.
I finally gathered up every bit of courage (I have had reason to develop courage in my life) and stepped to the room that held my first mother. She was beautiful. She was frail and beautiful in that frailness. Someone told me later that she was as afraid to meet me s I was to meet her. She did not want me to be angry with her. How could I have been? I had such a good life, I was so loved, and I so loved in return, that mother who truly mothered me. Thee she was. There was me. I grabbed her to me and held her as delicately as if she were my child. We embraced for a long time and then we moved a bit apart and she looked into my eyes (I am the only green-eyed child, of thirteen, and said, “Where did you get those green eyes?” Quick, always to retort, I laughed and said, “Yes, mother, where DID I get these green eyes?” It broke the ice and we spent hours over the net days together. She was wheelchair bound and could not leave the home, but I could go there whenever I could get time from meeting and getting to know all my siblings.
Home. Home is where Mother is.
©Carol Desjarlais 2.5.22
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