As many of you know Mother's Day is just around the corner. For me it takes on a whole different meaning. Yeah I'm a mom and I have an amazing husband and great kids who make the day so special for me, but this is the second Mother's day without my mom.
I've started, stopped, and edited this blog post too many times to count! But today I'm sharing with you my whole heart in little bits and pieces of the blog posts that I put together. Different stories, literally crammed together into one beautiful post. This one is really at the center of my heart and it took a lot to share. May is brain tumor awareness month and I felt it was a sign from the universe to share what glioblastoma did to my family. Below are pieces of different stories. But even bigger pieces of my heart.
One of my favorite family photos
I lost my mom. I don't think lost is the right word. Losing a loved one isn't like misplacing your keys. No cancer ripped my mom from us. We were best friends. She was my biggest cheerleader. The one person I could count on to be honest about my dreams. She'd often give me a dose of reality but support me anyway.
November 3rd 2017 started as any normal day. My husband had the day off from work. I'm not quite sure why now, maybe he had worked the night before or was taking a vacation day for something. I honestly don't remember. We were discussing going to breakfast and our plans for travel the next day for my mom's birthday when the phone rang. It was my mom. It wasn't unusual for her to call me at different points during the day, we talked pretty much every day, different times. When either one of us just had a minute to say hi. When I answered the phone this time it was different. She was crying. I couldn't understand what she was saying. She was so upset a month earlier when they had lost their dog and I got a very similar phone call from her. I couldn't figure out what had happened this time but I knew I had to calm her down because she was so hysterical. The words I finally got out from her was "I'm so confused. I don't know what's going on." I thought she was having a stroke. She showed every symptom and every sign of a stroke. I encouraged her to go to the ER after my sister-in-law came and checked her out and said it wasn't a stroke. I told her she had to go get looked at. The first words out of her mouth were "but who's going to take care of your dad?" Even in the moments when her life was falling apart and she was so confused that she didn't even know how to feed my dad she was worried about someone else. My aunt came and got her, took her to the hospital.
I'll forever remember where I was when my brother called me a couple hours later crying saying "mom has brain cancer." The doctor was so confident, it was just two small tumors. The size of the tip of your finger. Tiny, tiny tumors were destroying my mom. I made the three hour drive up there and spent the night with her in the hospital before surgery the next day, ironically on her birthday because only our mom would have brain surgery on her birthday! I sat with her that night. I don't think we slept at all. We talked and we laughed. I was so scared because of how confused she was about certain things she knew so well. She kept confusing the names of my kids and my pets I always talked so much about.
I still had faith that she was going to be fine.
It broke my heart to see her like that. There were a lot of things that went on that morning as a family that I'm just not going to share. I think until you get in that situation of having a loved one who's so sick you just can't put into words how that feels or what goes through your mind. It's such a personal experience.
My brother and I walked her as far as we could go to the operating room. She was still worried about all of us. She was worried about who was going to take care of dad and who was going to take care of us. We reminded her that she raised such independently strong children and that it was time for her to be selfish. This was the time for us to take care of her.
These moments are still so vivid in my mind that I pretty much relive them everyday. Having a doctor tell me that my mom only has weeks to live was the biggest gut-punch I've ever received. I had hope that she would be fine. The hope was taken away just like the air being sucked out of the room when the surgeon spoke.
My mom fought so hard for 6 weeks. She tried rehab to get some of her cognitive function back and some of the mobility left on the one side damaged by the tumors. I was so proud of her for being so strong and always being our families rock. Even through all of that, the weeks and weeks of fighting to just be with us, she really was and still is the rock of our family.
It doesn't even feel like she's gone. Something will happen and I'll be so excited and happy or devastated and sad and I want to pick up the phone and call her. The phone will be in my hand before I realize that I can't. She won't answer.
In the year-and-a-half that she's been gone she's had three more great grand babies. Every time one of those babies is born it reminds me of the love that she put in all of us. How proud she would be when we all get together and there's chaos, craziness, kids running around screaming and just having the best time ever. It reminds me that she made that. She created that. She brought all of our beautiful souls together.
Talking about her with my kids is one of my favorite things to do, I know some people might dread those conversations, but I love talking about her.
She had the best eyeroll that I'm grateful to have inherited. I still feel her in every hug I give. Every time my daughter wiggles her tiny button nose, thank god she got that from mooma and not papa, I see her face. But my most favorite thing to have inherited was LOVE. Simply to love so freely and to do it and say it everyday.
I miss her every single second and feel like a part of my own heart died. She'd actually hate to know that. I'm healing and grieving in my own way. I still talk to her everyday and I even feel her replies because every one of those conversations about nothing were in fact everything.
I can still feel her hand on mine in this picture
I would love to hear stories about your mom! Please share below.
I felt so powerful this weekend during a photo shoot!
