A Grieving, Human Mother

I blamed myself when my daughter died seventeen years ago today (photo is age-progressed, a gift from my children that I hadn’t known I needed until they gave it to me last Christmas). I shouldn’t have planned a home birth. I was too old. I’d had too many problems in childbirth with other children. I felt something was wrong. I should have done something, anything! I should have saved her.

Somehow, even if I know that I was doing the best I could with the information I had, I was her mother. And a mother is always supposed to stand between her child and death. I didn’t save her, so what kind of mother does that make me?

A grieving mother.

A human mother.

A powerless mother.

A despairing mother.

A broken mother.

A mother like every other mother who loves her child so much, who wants to fix everything, to make everything better or easy or just to take away the pain.

A mother who is not enough.

Because the one thing that motherhood has taught me is that no mother is ever enough. We can never fill all our children’s needs. We can’t even see those needs clearly most of the time. We are all scrambling and failing.

Over the last seventeen years, I have realized that part of my need to blame…