Mother’s Day (miesha)

I haven’t had that many mother’s days as a mom yet. This last May marked my third. In so many ways, most ways probably, I am still figuring out what it means to be a mom at all. It’s strange the images and thoughts that perseverate within grief and crisis. It’s been nearly 6 months now since the Mother’s day that would change everything and the images that have consistently come back to me throughout all of this are of Diana as a tiny baby in her mother’s arms and Matt as a little boy in hers.

For those of you that don’t know me directly my name is Miesha and Matt is my amazing husband. This is his story as much or more than it is mine and I write my part of it as a way to move heartbreak to written word, to get the story out of my body and on to paper and to document the story my little family has lived; its lessons marked upon us indelibly.

I had helped the girls make up little craft presents for the holiday. They had helped me glue pictures to popsicle sticks and then decorated them with those fluffy craft pom poms. Mya had picked out a little garden bucket and some translucent gems to fill it with, insisting that we also hide pieces of candy inside the rocks. Mya is three and she loves chocolate almost as much as her grandma does…did. I was frustrated because I was trying to use elmers glue and it just wouldn’t stick. I was annoyed that I hadn’t dug out the hot glue gun but now here Grandma was knocking at the door and since Mya was overexcited to present this bouquet of pictures, there was no time to make changes and here we were giving grandma a somewhat-still-wet garden of pictures with pom poms dancing off the stems and on to the floor more and more by the minute.

However red my cheeks may have been out of the chaos of that moment mixed with my own shame party about the glue fiasco, Grandma’s face was ten times as expressive. She was thrilled to receive our mess of a project and took the time to look at each and every picture with the girls while they munched on the treats.

“I picked out the candy.” Mya said to her grandma, full of pride.

At the end of the evening, we all gathered at the door. Mya currently insists that everyone “beep beep” when they leave our house meaning that they need to honk their horn to say goodbye as they drive away. After she checked in with Grandma we all lingered outside giving our last hugs and reminding her to have the time of her life. Matt walked with her to the car, pausing to continue a conversation that was out of my ear’s reach every couple steps. They probably took five minutes to finally reach the car door. She got into the car with Megan, her daughter and Matt’s sister, beep beeped and were on their way.

I’ve probably watched the ring cam footage of that goodbye 100 times in the last six months. I watch us standing there, chatting at the door, oblivious that our lives were about to change forever. I watch her say goodbye to each of her girls with a kiss and a hug. I watch her walk to the car and I scream inside my soul, “Don’t get in the car. Don’t go to the airport. Don’t go on that trip.” I hear her beep beep goodbye and then we turn inside and go on with the rest of the evening.

That wasn’t the last time we saw her but it was the last time that we saw her as the her we know her as… in the last six months at least. We still have no idea how her recovery will play out or how much consciousness she will be able to regain. It’s nearly six months and she is still across the ocean in a city she intended to stay at for three weeks. We kept calling it “a vacation of a lifetime” and the irony of that sits heavy with me.

Matt, my husband, has a superpower for observation and for intuition. He also has anxiety. The pairing of these things can confuse him as to when his spidey-sense for what’s up ahead is honest and when his worrying-mind is taking control. Matt worried… maybe he knew that something really bad was going to happen.

I asked him about that walk to the car and what they talked about. He was asking her if she was sure she wanted to go. He reminded her that it was okay to change her mind. She told him to stop worrying and he told her “You just make sure you come back to us.”

I just keep thinking about her as a young mom raising my husband, rocking him to sleep like I rock my two little ladies to bed every night. I keep thinking about her as a tiny little girl, fresh to the world and unstained yet by life’s experiences. I guess motherhood, to me, has been the center of this tragedy. Her mothering of me, Matt and Megan’s sense of duty and purity of love to fly across the globe and be with her as her children and the ways in which I have had to rise as a mother to find the strength to be there for my daughters and family through this all.

You just make sure you come back to us mom.