I’ve been away and I’m trying to come back

Yes, I am still the Accidental Stay at Home Mom. But I apparently so accidentally came to it that I do not fully know how to embrace it. So I took a serious hiatus from blogging; life had overcome me in a serious way. Two big things have happened to me that, paradoxically, invited more self-reflection but sucked away any time and energy to do it.

Last summer, around the time of my last blog post, I began working on A Book! It is the book that caused months of rejection and desperation. Finally, a publisher, a real publisher, wanted me and my co-author to write it. It still causes desperation and rejection and will continue to do so probably until it is published (April 2017, allegedly) and long after. But it is also consuming very much of my time and my mental energy, which were pretty limited to start with.

Then in February, my mom died. One day you have a parent — one day you are a mom with a mom, and then suddenly you aren’t. My mom’s health had been rocky for a while — first she had ovarian cancer, which was not symptomatic but involved literally hundreds of rounds of chemo treatment, and then she developed a severe blood condition.

One thing I learned from my mom’s ordeal is the limits of one’s ability to understand death until it happens. Yes, I knew that she was going to die. I knew that when her weight had dropped to sub-100 pounds and she had a hard time walking 3 blocks and the doctors said “acute leukemia,” there was only one way this diagnosis was going. But I don’t think human cognition can grasp the significance of death until after it actually occurs. My mom was just always around. The world without her phone calls, chit-chat, solicited and unsolicited parenting advice, planning conversations, silly and ironic jokes, trinkets for me and the boys, and her compassion, was simply a world my brain could not fathom. I had never considered the loss of all of those things despite the hours I had spent with her as her health declined, or the subsequent hours I spent with my other family members reviewing her condition and the meaning of it. So now I have that world, I am living in that world, that I had never considered.

I’m not a huge mother’s day fan and in truth neither was my mom, but this mother’s day I felt acutely the truth that now I am the mom. Sometimes when I hear my kids call “mommy,” I think they are actually talking to someone else. It takes a several-second recall – OK, a double-digit second recall – to remember who they are referring to. Sometimes I used to think they were talking to my mom, the Ur-mom. But now it’s just me. I’m the mom.

Anyway, I’m back.