Speaking of Sacred Spaces …
I talk to her like I always did, telling her stories of Annabelle and Henry while she stares at me.
I laugh as I tell her about the time she left me at church in San Ramon when I was 4 back in the 70s.
Every Sunday, she put on her skirt, gogo boots, cat-eye sunglasses, and piled all 6 of us into our orange VW Bus to go to church. She drove the big flat steering wheel, wearing her “Sunday wig” styled in a fancy auburn beehive. It usually sat perfectly coiffed on a foam head on the top shelf of her closet so we wouldn’t play with it, but I spent a lot of time in that closet trying to figure out how I could climb up there and get it.
Beauty was important to my Mom.
I laugh as I remind her how much she loved to tell the story of driving all the way home and suddenly noticing Marci wasn’t in the car, how she came back to get me and I was sitting happily on the curb by myself just waiting for her to return.
Now she stares at me and when I laugh, sometimes laughing with me, though her eyes have an achy faraway expression.
Back at my sister’s, I tell her about writing strategies and all the different terms for brainstorming, mind mapping, etc. I tell her I’m going to hang with my Mom to brainstorm names for my new business, a new method called “Blank Stare Brainstorming.” We laugh because our hearts hurt so much seeing her like this.
Our conversations are peppered with: “How does someone so full of life end up like this?” Then we jump to the next topic because it hurts too much.
But there’s nowhere I’d rather be than in this sacred space reading Little Critter books to my Mom.
She was a teacher, she loved these books.
She still is a teacher, now just mine, teaching me to walk right into the heartbreak, to find ways to cut through the fog by making her laugh with my dancing, teaching me to not be afraid of the aching howling chaos of those blank stares, because whether she remembers me or not, I have enough love for both of us.
I lay it around her shoulders like those patchwork quilts she always adored, and stay in that sacred space that is my Mom.
