What My Mother Left In Me

Over the years, I have been told more than once that I need to move on from the death of my mother.

I understand why grief can be uncomfortable for people. There is something about continuing to talk about someone who has been gone for years that some people don't quite know what to do with. There seems to be an unspoken timeline attached to loss: grieve deeply in the beginning, slowly put yourself back together and, eventually, arrive at some place where the loss no longer takes up so much space.

But that hasn't been my experience.

The death of my mother was one of the most significant turning points of my life. Losing her didn't simply make me sad; it changed me. It affected my identity, my faith, the way I mother, the way I understand family and even the way I see the woman my mother was. There is a version of me who existed before she died and another who had to learn how to live after.

That doesn't mean I haven't healed. I have. It doesn't mean that I live every day consumed by grief, because I don't. My life has continued in beautiful ways. My family has grown, I have grown, and there has been laughter, joy, purpose and so much life since losing her. But I have learned that healing doesn't require me to stop missing my mother. Grief, healing and learning to embrace the person I became after losing her have somehow learned to coexist.

I know this particular post may not resonate with everyone. If you have never experienced a loss that fundamentally altered the shape of your life, some of what I am about to say may be difficult to understand. But there are women who will understand it immediately, particularly those who have had to learn how to mother after losing their own mothers.

I don't simply want to tell those women, “You are not alone.” We hear that often in conversations about grief, and while it is true, sometimes it isn't enough. I want you to know that continuing to grieve does not mean you have failed to heal. Healing does not require forgetting. Moving forward does not mean leaving her behind. You can build a beautiful life around an absence you never asked for, and you can embrace who you are becoming while still acknowledging the loss that helped shape you.

Lately, I have found myself thinking less about the day my mother died and more about the life I have lived since. I think about the woman she was, the mother she was, and all the ways her absence has shaped the mother I have become. Of all the things I expected grief to make me miss, I wasn't prepared for how much I would miss my mother while being a mother myself.

When I was a little girl, my mother and I were inseparable. As I got older, I entered my slightly rebellious adolescent era. Or at least what passed for rebellion when you were being raised by a Ghanaian mother. There was only so far I was prepared to take things because, quite frankly, I valued my life. My mother had perfected the look, and most of the time that was enough to bring me back to my senses. The threats to send me to Ghana might have helped a bit too. On the rare occasion that I decided to test the limits of her authority, she had backup. One phone call to my uncle and whatever teenage revolution I thought I was leading was promptly cancelled. Needless to say, my rebellious era was neither particularly rebellious nor particularly long.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I simply got better at hiding it. I learned how to keep certain parts of my life neatly out of sight. Then I became pregnant and, well, there wasn't much hiding that. Suddenly, everything I had worked so carefully to keep tucked away was out in the open. Given the Ghanaian iron fist I had been raised under, I braced myself for what I assumed would follow. Instead, I was surprised by just how supportive my mother became. In many ways, motherhood introduced me to another version of her. I wasn't only her daughter anymore. I was becoming a mother too, and somehow that brought us closer.

I was a single mother, but because of her, I never really felt like one. She was deeply woven into our everyday lives, particularly where her grandchildren were concerned. She helped me through pregnancies and postpartum seasons, cared for my children, offered plenty of advice, whether I requested it or not, and gave me somewhere to land when motherhood became heavy. When I was pregnant, she would ensure my fufu cravings were satisfied and staying at her house with the kids became an almost weekly ritual. Even after I married and moved away, our closeness remained. We spoke every day and saw each other often. She wasn't simply someone I loved; she was part of the infrastructure of my life.

Then, when I was 35 years old, I lost her.

Her death was somehow expected and sudden at the same time. She had been diagnosed with cancer and, in a very characteristically maternal attempt to protect me, tried to keep the reality of her prognosis from me. There is more to that part of our story than I can fit here, but by the time the palliative care doctors told me that she did not have much time left, there really wasn't much time at all.

When Grief Finally Found Me

The months immediately following her death are still somewhat blurry. As an only child, there wasn't anyone else to hand the responsibility to. I had to bury my mother while trying to comprehend the fact that she was actually gone. I made arrangements, answered questions and explained what had happened over and over again to people who knew and loved her. There was so much that needed to be done that I don't think I had the capacity yet to understand what living without her would actually mean.

It wasn't until about six months later that I began to unravel. For most of my life, I had relied on my mother to help me through almost everything. School, motherhood, pregnancy, postpartum, needing company, needing advice, needing a break. She had been there for all of it. Sometimes I didn't need anything from her at all. I just needed someone to talk to, and I knew I could talk to my mother about almost anything without judgement. When she died, I wasn't simply grieving someone I loved. I was suddenly trying to figure out how to live without one of the people around whom I had built my life.

I began to realize how much of my identity was intertwined with hers. My mother had held my hand through so many seasons that when her hand was suddenly gone, I genuinely didn't know how to navigate some of them without her. I didn't know how to mother without being able to ask her opinion. I didn't know how to make certain decisions without wondering what she would say. I didn't know where to go when I needed a break or what to do with all the thoughts I would normally have picked up the phone to share with her.

Motherhood, of course, did not stop because I was grieving. My children still needed me, life kept moving, and apparently so did my commitment to having children because, despite my mother's very clear instructions that I should not have any more, I did exactly that. I know she would have lectured me about it, but I also know she would have loved every single one of them.

Knowing My Mother As A Woman

Getting older has allowed me to understand something I couldn't fully understand when she was alive: my mother was a woman before she was my mother.

As a child, I knew her primarily in relation to me. Even after I became an adult, it was easy to see her through the lens of what she was to us: Mom, Grandma, helper, confidante, the person who showed up. Now that I have lived more life and carried more responsibility myself, I think differently about the woman underneath all of those roles.

My mother was incredibly loving. She was hardworking and deeply selfless, and so much of her life was spent making sure the people she loved were okay. I understand now how much that must have cost her at times. I understand the exhaustion that can hide beneath being dependable. I understand what it means to keep showing up when you are tired because people are counting on you. I understand how easily motherhood can consume so much of a woman's identity that she can forget, or simply not have the space, to ask who she is outside of the people who need her.

I think differently now about what it must have been like when I moved out. At the time, I was doing what daughters are supposed to do: growing up, getting married, building a home and creating a life of my own. But my mother had spent so much of her life being Mom and then Grandma that I now wonder what that transition felt like for her. I wonder what it was like to suddenly have to build a life around her own wants after so many years of building one around ours.

There are questions I wish I had thought to ask her. I would ask about her dreams, not simply the dreams she had for me. I would ask what she wanted for herself. I would ask what she sacrificed that I never noticed and what parts of herself she put aside while she was busy caring for everyone else. I would want to know more about the woman she was when she wasn't being my mother.

Perhaps that is one of the harder parts of growing older without your mother. You finally reach an age where you understand her differently, only to realize there are conversations you can no longer have.

Learning To Mother Without Her

There are so many times now when I wish I could call her. I wish she were here for the pregnancies, the births and those exhausting newborn months when she would have known exactly how to care for me while I cared for a baby. I wish I could ask her what she thinks when I am facing a difficult parenting decision. And now that I have raised teenagers myself, I would especially like to know how she managed to raise one without completely losing her mind.

But more than any advice, sometimes I simply want my mother. I could talk to her about anything without feeling judged, and there are days when that is what I miss most. I don't need her to solve anything. I just want to be able to tell her about my life.

I wish she could have met all of her grandchildren. I wish she could see their personalities developing and laugh at the things they do. One of my children is a foodie by blood, and I know my mother would have absolutely adored that. She loved children with hearty appetites, so the two of them would have gotten along just fine. Some have inherited her stubbornness. Some have her sense of humour. One loves music and dancing the way she did. My older children have memories of the things she taught them, while some of the younger ones only have fragments, like sitting with Grandma and eating fufu.

So I talk about her. I tell her stories. I point out the pieces of her that I recognize in them. I recognize those pieces in myself too, perhaps more now than I did when she was alive. I hear her in some of my lectures. I recognize her in my fierce protectiveness of my children and, admittedly, in some of my own iron-fist tendencies. There are moments when I open my mouth and realize that somewhere along the way, I became more like my mother than I ever intended to be.

Even as I sit here writing these words, I miss her because I know she would be proud of me. There are things happening in my life now that I would love to tell her about. There are still moments when my instinct is to want the safety of being someone's daughter rather than the person everyone else needs.

When Grief Changed My Faith

Losing my mother also changed my relationship with God in ways I did not expect. At her funeral, I stood before everyone and said that being raised in church had given me the strength to stand through losing her. At the time, those were the words I knew. They were the kind of words the church girl in me had been taught to say when life hurt.

But what I said at her funeral and what I experienced in the months that followed were not quite the same thing. Grief eventually took me somewhere much less polished. I became angry with God. I wrestled with why my mother had to leave so soon, and there was a period when I wanted nothing to do with faith at all. The familiar church phrases weren't enough for what I was experiencing because I wasn't looking for a lesson in grief. I wanted my mother back.

Over time, though, my faith changed. It became less about knowing the right things to say and more about learning where to go with the things I couldn't fix. I had spent so much of my life depending on my mother that her death exposed how much security I had placed in knowing she was there. Without her, I slowly had to learn a different kind of dependence on God as a wife, as a mother and, strangely enough, as a daughter whose mother was no longer physically here.

That doesn't mean God replaced her. I don't believe grief works that way. I still miss her, and there are seasons when I feel as though I need her more now than I ever did when she was alive. What has changed is my understanding of what she left behind.

What She Left In Me

For a long time, I thought about how much I had lost when I lost my mother. Now I also think about how much she managed to give me before she left.

That realization has changed the way I mother my own children. Like most mothers, I spend a great deal of time thinking about what my children need from me right now: whether they are safe, loved, supported and prepared for whatever season they are in. But losing my mother has made me ask a much harder question: am I putting enough inside of my children for them to be okay when one day I am no longer here?

My mother held my hand through so much of my life that when she died, I wasn't sure I knew how to walk without her. Years later, I realize that while I may have felt unprepared, she had actually spent a lifetime preparing me. Her love, her work ethic, her selflessness, her faith, her fierce protection, her stubbornness, her laughter, her lectures and even those weekly bowls of fufu became part of what I carried forward. I just didn't realize how much she had placed inside me until I had to carry it without her.

For every woman who is mothering without her mother, I know there are days when that absence feels louder than others. There is a peculiar ache in having people call for “Mom” all day while some part of you still longs to call your own. Gratitude for the children in front of you does not cancel the grief you carry for the mother who is missing. Both things can exist in the same heart.

I am still learning how to mother without my mother. I suspect some part of me always will be. But I am also learning that her mothering did not end when her life did. It lives in the woman she helped shape, in the grandchildren she loved, in the ones she never got to meet, and in the things I now find myself teaching them because she first taught them to me.

Perhaps that is part of what our mothers leave us: not a life in which we will never need them, but enough of themselves within us to keep going when we do.