I’ve been missing her a lot lately. I’ve been wondering what she would think of me if she could see me now, a thirty-four year old mother of two little girls. It’s a hard thing, to become a mother without having one in your life. I have so many questions and I find myself wondering about a thousand little things every day.

I wonder what I was like as a baby. Did I make these faces, these sounds? Was I a good sleeper? An early talker? Did I cry a lot?

But mostly I wonder about her as a mother. Was it what she imagined? Did she love it? Did she sometimes hate it too? Was there an exact moment when she fell in love with me or did it come in grand, sweeping waves like mine does for my girls? Did she ever want to have a second child? Was I good enough for her?

A woman I went to kindergarten with had her first baby this week and the woman’s mother sent me a photo in which she is holding her little granddaughter. Her mother was a good friend of my mother’s and I sat there at my desk, looking at this photo of my mom’s friend with her first grandchild and I tried to imagine my mother in her place, holding Vera or Juliette in her arms, and looking proudly up at the camera. I tried to imagine the email she would have sent, how thrilled she would have been.

It’s at once easy to imagine, and also impossible.

Last night, Vera kept waking up from unsettling dreams, and in some weird twist of events that often happen in families of young children, Greg ended up sleeping alone in Vera’s bedroom and I ended up with the two girls in our bed. Once they were both asleep on either side of me, Jules nestled in against my side, breathing like a little kitten, and Vera with one leg flung over my abdomen, snoring like a grown man, I found myself unable to sleep. I lay there, flat on my back, these two little life forms on either side of me, staring up into the dark at the barely visible ceiling, thinking about my mother again.

What if she could see me right now, I thought. Then I rephrased the thought, aiming truer. I wish she could see me, right here, right now. Mom, mom, mom, I called silently into the night. Please see me. See me here with my two daughters, all of us inextricably linked, even though you’re gone. They’re part of you, part of me. 

And then the hardest part.

I need you, mom. I need you maybe more than I’ve ever needed you. 

The woman whom I most want to teach me how to be a woman is not here, and I wish she was.

If I’m going to be honest, I’ll admit that a not-so-small part of me thinks she would have all the answers I’m seeking. That she could whisper in my ear, just like she did when I was a girl, just like I do now to my own girls, all the secret assurances that would enable me to take a deeper breath, to feel like it’s all okay. To feel like who I am is okay.

“I love you with a fierceness that overwhelms me with its intensity,” she wrote in a letter to me once. “I promise you I will be here to see you grow up and go to college, and see your work published and meet your husband and be grandmother to your children. I promise.”

I come back to this letter every once in a while and I let my eyes trace over those words, let my entire body yearn for them to be true. So much of me thinks that because she wrote them, because those words, that promise, exists in writing, right here in her very own handwriting, then they must be true.

I can only content myself with this:

When I promise my own girls that I will see them through their lives, that I will be there for them through anything they do or become, I mean it from a place deeper than I’d ever realized existed. My promise exists in a place that transcends time, that transcends physical boundaries, that transcends whatever may come between us in this lifetime. Even death.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. I never anticipated the physical closeness that would come with having a child. Sometimes, at the end of a long day, I find it cloying, but most of the time it’s something that I cherish, all too aware of how brief this part of our lives together will be. “Promise me we’ll always snuggle?” I asked Vera, knowing that it was a promise she could never keep, already imagining her in ten years resisting my hugs, just as I did with my own mother. “I promise,” she said, nuzzling closer.

“I miss my mom,” I said then, not knowing if I meant to say it out loud or not.

“It’s okay, mom,” Vera said. “You’ve got me.”

And she was right.

The few times I voiced missing my mother to Veronica, this has always been her response. I wonder how she knows. I wonder how this little girl of three years old knows that indeed she has made my mother’s death okay in a thousand ways. Whatever gaping, gasping hole my mother’s death left in my heart, Veronica has filled and overfilled and stretched to fill some more. The hole is still there yes, but it’s so full of love and life and realness that you’d almost never be able to tell that it was a hole in the first place.

And in becoming a mother I’ve seemingly resurrected my own mother. I hear her every day in my own voice, and I don’t just mean that I sound like her. I mean that I startle myself, that I sometimes wonder if it isn’t her speaking right through me. That the very essence of my mother, and probably of her mother and her mother’s mother, reach right up through my bones, flood through my blood and skin until they become light and air and sound; my mother’s voice hanging in the air of my living room on a sunny September afternoon in Santa Monica.

And so when I say I miss her, and when my daughter responds that it’s okay, for the first time in fifteen years, it really is.

Last night at 3:34 I was thinking about what a weird kid I used to be. I think it’s just part of being an only child; you spend an awful lot of time on your own, with way too much time to ponder the world around you. I remember spending hours and hours playing by myself in my room, or in the backyard at our house in Florida. Some afternoons when I came home from school I would immediately head out for either the woods behind our house or the bay in front of it, the last daylight hours slipping quickly by as I meandered along on my own, overturning dead horseshoe crabs under the dock or examining clumps of Spanish moss in the trees.

All this to say, that I think this kind of aloneness had an effect on the kind of person I was…er, am. Maybe I was always this person — self-aware, deeply reflective, painfully nostalgic — but regardless, a way was paved for me that was a bit different than that of my peers. By the time I was fourteen and we were living back in Atlanta, both of my parents having gone through the very first rounds of treatment for their cancer, I was beginning my first forays the world of the metaphysical. Books on lucid dreaming, wicca and self-healing were piled on my night stand, alongside a jar of lavender oil and a well-worn journal that I wrote copiously in every day.

This is what I was thinking about last night at 3:34 in the morning. My adolescent self and how open I once was to the world. Lying there last night I recalled a particular stretch of my ninth grade year when I concentrated on learning how to control my dreams, on how to wake up in the middle of them, yet still be dreaming. Lucid dreaming. I achieved it too. I still remember those dreams, the ones in which I was aware that I was dreaming. I haven’t really experienced them since that time, but I know that I probably could if I worked as hard at it as I did back then.

Around that same time, I was also practicing Wiccan love spells on the boys at school that I had a crush on. One weekend I even convinced a couple of my girlfriends to run naked through my full-moon-lit backyard with me, sprinkling rose petals, in an effort to get tenth grader Mike Huxtable to notice me. (It didn’t work.) Not long after that I was visiting the new age shop in our neighborhood on a regular basis, running my fingers across the trays of multi-colored crystals and signing up for transcendental meditation workshops.

I don’t remember when I started to move away from all of this, maybe after my mother died. She was always a little weird too, always fascinated by the occult, and generally into the alternative side of just about anything. After she died, in my grief, all of that seemed less stable than ever, and in a panic I reverted to an existential stance that felt more comforting. For a long time after she was gone I craved more walls, more boxes, more restraints around my ideas about life, and I left behind my crystals and dream books and wiccan love spells.

In truth though, I never stopped questioning or wondering, never stopped reading about alternative ways of life and feeling tempted to peek behind the veil I’d pulled around my life. I’ve been reminded of all of this more so than ever in the last year, as I’ve been working on this afterlife book. I’ve had to relearn how to open my mind to different possibilities, and I’ve been struck over and over, by memories of myself at a younger age. I know that I was filled a lot more naivete, but I know that I was also a lot braver than I am now. I was so much more confident in my abilities to transcend conventional ideas, particularly those that coming from my own mind.

So this is what I was thinking about at 3:34 in the morning last night, lying there in the dark. Namely that I was impressed that my adolescent self had something very real to teach my adult self.

–

p.s. Check out this interview I did with author Julianna Baggott on her website. She’s one of those writers that makes me feel all bashful and embarrassed because I’m such a fan of hers.