My Mother, From a Distance

(shared with permission)

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My mother is 80 years old. She lives alone now in Lethbridge, Alberta, in an old folks’ home. I am sitting on a terrace in Mexico, watching the Sea of Cortez turn from blue to silver in the fading light, and I am thinking about her hands.

She has always had capable hands. Hands that kneaded bread dough on Sunday mornings, the kitchen warm with yeast and CBC radio playing softly in the background. Hands that crotched quilts for babies born, each stitch a prayer, each pattern chosen with care. Hands that combed my hair before church, her fingers quick and certain. The spirit of God’s hands, I think, though I am not sure that is fair, as I am not a believer in her religion or the religion I was brought up in. Perhaps they are simply mother hands, shaped by decades of service, of showing up, of being useful to everyone but herself.

Recuerdos de Su Cocina / Memories of Her Kitchen

I remember standing on a step stool beside her at the counter, learning to roll pierogi. “Not too much flour,” she would say, her hands guiding mine. “You want it tender, not tough.” I was seven, maybe eight. The kitchen smelled of potatoes and cheese, and outside, the wind was blowing snow against the windows. I felt safe in that kitchen, in the warmth of the oven, in the certainty of her presence beside me.

Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), the humanist geographer, writes about topophilia, the affective bond between people and place. My mother’s kitchen was my first topophilic space, a location where I learned that love could be measured in teaspoons and rolling pins, in the quiet act of making something nourishing with your hands. I carry that kitchen with me still, even here, 2,800 kilometres away, watching a sea she has never seen.

She taught me to can plums in late summer, the kitchen steaming, jars lined up on the counter like soldiers. We would work for hours, cutting and slicing and packing fruit into hot glass, the syrup sweet and golden. “This will taste like sunshine in January,” she would say, and she was right. Those jars, lined up in the cold room, were promises against the long, cold winter. They were her way of saying, “I will take care of you.” I will make sure you have enough.

El amor de una madre vive en lo que prepara.

A mother’s love lives in what she prepares.

La Fe de Mi Madre / My Mother’s Faith

She raised me in the Church of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a faith I no longer practice but whose rhythms still live somewhere deep in my body. I remember the scratch of my Sunday dress against my legs, the smell of the Kingdom Hall a mix of old hymnals and furniture polish and the faint sweetness of old lady sweat. I remember my mother’s voice beside me, singing hymns she knew by heart, her alto steady and sure.

She believed, and still believes, with a certainty in something, as she switched to the Mormon Church later in life. I never saw “her God” in the way she did. For her, the gospel is as real as the mountains outside my home in British Columbia, as solid as the bread she bakes, as certain as the sun rising over the prairie. She knows that families are eternal, that her late husband waits for her beyond the veil, that God has a plan, and she is part of it. I envy her this certainty sometimes, the way it holds her steady through grief and loss and the long silence of widowhood.

I left the Church in my teens, quietly, without announcement, the way one might slip out of a party before the host notices. It was not dramatic. There was no single moment of rupture, no crisis of faith that announced itself with thunder. It was more like a slow loosening, a gradual recognition that I no longer believed what I had been taught to believe, that the structure that held my mother so securely felt to me like a house I had outgrown.

Sandra Bloom (2007) writes about ambiguous loss, defined as grief that accompanies losses that are unclear, unresolved, and without the finality of death. I wonder sometimes if my mother grieves the daughter she thought she was raising, the one who would marry in the temple and bear children in the covenant and sit beside her in the celestial kingdom. I am still her daughter, but I am also a kind of ghost of the daughter she imagined. This is a loss we do not speak of, a room in our relationship we have agreed to keep the door closed on.

Pequeñas Bondades / Small Kindnesses

And yet she loves me. This I know. I know it in the way she asks about my work, even though she does not fully understand what I do, her questions sincere and slightly bewildered: “So you’re still teaching at that university?” Yes, Mom. Still teaching. Her way of showing love is more in spirit than in words or deeds.

Gary Chapman (1992) popularised the concept of love languages, the idea that people express and receive love in different ways: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. My mother’s love language has always been acts of service, the doing of things, the making and mending and bringing of soup through snowstorms. She may not say “I love you” often, but she says it in every jar of peaches, every quilt, every four-hour drive through dangerous weather.

El amor no siempre tiene palabras. A veces tiene sopa de pollo.

Love does not always have words. Sometimes it has chicken soup.

Viuda / Widow

Her husband died two years ago. They had been married for only a few years, long enough that she had learned the shape of his presence: the way he took his soda, the sound of his wheelchair in the hallway, the weight of his hand on her leg as he sat next to her.

I think about her alone in that apartment, moving through rooms that still hold his absence. The recliner where he sat to watch the news. The side of the bed that is still, somehow, his side, even though he will never lie there again. Miriam Greenspan (2004) writes that grief is one of the dark emotions, those feelings our culture teaches us to rush through rather than honour. “Grief is the emotion of connection,” she writes, “the binding force of love turned into the dark energy of sorrow” (p. 98).

My mother’s faith offers her a framework for this sorrow: the belief that marriage is eternal, that she will see him again, that death is a temporary separation rather than a final goodbye. I do not share this belief, but I am grateful she has it. It gives her something to hold in the long nights, something to reach for when the house feels too quiet, and the bed feels too empty, and the grief feels too heavy to bear alone.

When I call her on Sunday evenings, she tells me about the temple sessions and the neighbour who helped her with the puzzle. She tells me about the weather, about the cat who visits her backyard, and about the book she is reading from the church library. She does not tell me about the moments when she reaches for him in the night and finds only empty sheets. She does not tell me about crying in the shower, where no one can hear. These things I imagine, because I am her daughter, because I know her, because some things do not need to be spoken to be understood.

Lo Que Más Recuerdo / What I Remember Most

I remember her hands in the garden, turning soil, planting seeds, pulling weeds with a determination that seemed almost fierce. She grew tomatoes, potatoes, and carrots, and every summer we would spend long evenings in the backyard, the light golden and slanted, the smell of earth and green things all around us. “Everything needs tending,” she told me once, her fingers in the dirt, a tomato plant cupped gently in her palm. “Gardens, families, faith. You have to show up and do the work.”

After she left my dad in 1977, I remember her sitting at the kitchen table late at night, paying bills by the light of a single lamp, her forehead creased with worry she tried to hide from us children. I did not understand then what I understand now: how hard she worked, how much she sacrificed, how many of her own dreams she set aside so that we could have enough. I wonder what she wanted to be before she became a mother. I wonder if she remembers.

I remember the way she cried when missing my grade eight graduation, her face wet with loss and somehow also sad, almost knowingly that she had to choose to put food on the table over celebration. For years, I made her feel guilty about this, but as a parent, only I can now understand how challenging life can be as a single mother. Love and loss are always tangled together; mothers carry a grief their children cannot fully see.

Judith Herman (1992), in her landmark work on psychological trauma, writes about the importance of witnessing, the act of truly seeing another person’s experience and honouring it as real. I want to witness my mother. I want to see not just the capable hands and the Sunday faith and the birthday cards that arrive on time, but also the woman beneath all that doing, the woman who had dreams before she had children, who carries losses she does not speak of, who has spent eighty years being useful and may never have learned that she was allowed to simply be.

Detrás de cada madre hay una mujer que olvidamos ver.

Behind every mother is a woman we forget to see.

La Distancia Entre Nosotras / The Distance Between Us

There are 2,800 kilometres between Loreto and Lethbridge. I looked it up. It would take thirty hours to drive, if you could drive across the Sea of Cortez, which, of course, you cannot. The distance feels larger than kilometres can measure: the distance between faith and its absence, between the life she imagined for me and the life I have made, between who she raised me to be and who I have become.

Carol Gilligan (1982), in her foundational work on women’s moral development, argued that women often define themselves through relationships, through connection, through care for others. She called this the ethic of care, a moral framework centred on responsibility and responsiveness rather than abstract principles of justice. My mother embodies this ethic. She has spent eighty years caring for her children, her husbands, her clients, anyone who needed a casserole, a listening ear, or a quilt stitched with prayers. I wonder if she knows how to care for herself. I wonder if anyone ever taught her that she was allowed.

I am here in Mexico learning to rest, learning to be still, learning to believe that I am enough without producing, without performing, without earning my place. And I wonder: did I learn my relentlessness from her? Did she learn it from her mother? How many generations of women have run themselves ragged in service to others, believing that rest was selfishness, that stillness was sin, that their worth depended on their usefulness?

Una Carta Que No Enviaré / A Letter I Will Not Send

Querida Mamá,

I am sitting by the sea in Mexico, thinking about you. I am thinking about your hands and your faith and the way you have always shown love through doing. I am thinking about the perogies you taught me to roll, the plums we canned in the summer heat, the quilt you drove through a snowstorm to bring me.

I am thinking about how tired you must be. How tired you have always been. How you never learned to rest because no one ever told you that rest was allowed. I wish I could give you what I am learning here: the knowledge that you are enough, that you have always been enough, that your worth was never something you had to earn.

I am sorry I left the Church. I am sorry I cannot be the daughter you imagined. I am sorry for all the silences between us, the questions we do not ask, the truths we keep hidden to protect each other. But I am grateful, too. Grateful that you loved me anyway. Grateful that you still call on Sundays. Grateful that your faith gives you comfort even though I cannot share it.

I see you, Mom. I see the woman behind the capable hands, behind the Sunday faith, behind the chicken soup and the quilts. I see how much you have given. I see how much it costs. I wish I had told you sooner. I am telling you now, even though you will never read this letter.

Te quiero, Mamá. Siempre.

I will not send this letter. James Pennebaker (1997), whose research on expressive writing demonstrated the healing power of putting painful experiences into words, found that writing about difficult emotions can improve both psychological and physical health, even if the writing is never shared. The writing itself is the medicine. I am writing my way toward understanding, toward compassion, toward a peace I am still learning to name.

Esta Noche / Tonight

The sun has set. The sea is dark now, just the sound of waves and the occasional cry of a seabird. In Lethbridge, it is already late. My mother is probably in bed, her scriptures on the nightstand, her prayers said, the empty space beside her filled with faith and memory and the shape of a husband who is no longer there.

I will call her tomorrow. I will ask about the church, and the neighbour and whether she has been sleeping well. I will not tell her about this essay, about the memories I have been turning over like stones, about the letter I wrote and will never send. Some things are better held gently, privately, like a prayer offered in silence.

But tonight, across 2,800 kilometres of desert and mountain and sea, I am holding her in my heart. I am thanking her for the hands that shaped me, even as I am learning to shape myself differently. I am forgiving us both for the silences, for the distances, for the love that does not always know how to speak. I am seeing her, finally, not just as my mother but as a woman: tired and faithful and braver than I ever knew, standing in her kitchen, rolling out pie crust, teaching me without words that love is something you make with your hands.

Ella es mi madre.

She is my mother.

Y yo soy su hija.

And I am her daughter.

Eso es todo. Eso es suficiente.

That is everything. That is enough.

References

Bloom, S. L. (2007). Loss, trauma, and resilience: Therapeutic work with ambiguous loss. Psychiatric Services, 58(3), 419-420.

Chapman, G. (1992). The five love languages: How to express heartfelt commitment to your mate. Northfield Publishing.

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.

Greenspan, M. (2004). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala.

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.

Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions. Guilford Press.

Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.