My childhood memories of my mother are very hazy. She’s almost absent – a blur – a mist billowing around the scenes of abuse that strung together become the story of my life from my birth till the time I escaped my father’s house. She’s was there but never with the power to protect me, or comfort me or my siblings.

A memory that I do have is of me as a 3 ish year old following my mother as she did her chores about the house. I remember seeking to engage with her. Sometimes this worked; I’d get a glance or a smile, maybe a pat on the head; often it didn’t.

I especially enjoyed going out to our backyard while she tended her garden. My mom kept roses , herbs and sunflowers. Huge sunflowers that bobbed happily in the summer sun. Flowers from wich my mother collected the seeds which she would toast and share with her children come fall.

I can close my eyes and see my mother’s face smiling and surrounded by sunflowers. In my child’s mind , the flowers and my mother became one. My mother was not tangible – but the flowers were. I could not reach her but i could reach them, touch them , though the flowers hovered far above my head. I loved them and i poured all my love into them. I counted the cold winter days until the Spring and Summer when the sunflowers would return.

My mother left her children when i was about 5 years old. She left my abusive father and disappeared. I would find out much late that that my older step brother aided her escape. It would be about 3 years before I would see my mother again.

The spring after her departure the sunflowers did not bloom. I cannot relate the horror this represented to me- the pain was inexhaustible. Each day I’d go out to the garden and search the earth – i’d lie down in the dirt and weep. They were gone and i had no idea how to bring them back. She was gone and i had no idea how to bring her back – i felt hysterical and broken and there was no one whom i could trust to understand me. The flowers were dead. My mother was dead. i was overwhelmed in a soul sucking grief. A grief i held in my heart and which festered there, until as a young woman in my 20s. I began therapy. There I talked about this and many other wounds to heal them, to free myself.

Fast forward – I’m now a 30 something young woman enjoying an evening out with my mother. She’d come to alifornia to visit with me and my kids. We were enjoying our meal when for some reason, I can’t remember why, i mentioned the sunflowers.

“Oh those ugly things!”, she exclaimed dismissively – cutting me off mid sentence. I was stunned by her comment. The room swirled around me. My mouth went dry. I took a sip of water.

“You hated them?!.” I finally half whispered. “Why did you grow them?”

“They were just something for me to do, “ She said.

I stared at her agast. My mouth gaping open – i simply couldn’t believe what what she’d said. I sat there shaking my head and then finally burst into tears.

My mother was visibly upset. I heard her asking repeatedly, what was wrong? Why was i crying? -she held my hand and kept asking “what’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

It took sometime before – but it finally spilled out of me; my story of these plants and what they meant to me as a little child. How i loved them and how I’d grieved for years when they disappeared – when she disappeared. And how my sad and terror filled childhood intensified with the absence of my mother , and the sunflowers.

She apologized for her comment and for cutting me of before she’d heard my point. But that’s the way things always went between my mother and me. I was a mystery to her. I examined things that she would rather not. I cried when she felt that I should laugh. My mom wanted everyone around her to be happy. She wanted her children to be happy. That’s all – just smile and we’ll all feel better. A philosophy that was foreign to me. For me exploration has meant everything – hunting for the truth even though the truth may hurt.

Knowing the truth of how my mother felt about those flowers doesn’t diminish what they meant to me as a child. My ability to pour my love those flowers allowed me to pour my love into SOMETHING. Something that resonated in my soul – gave me peace. A replacement for my unhappy distracted mother – I worshipped the flowers as I wished to worship her. They were all of life to me.

To her ,the sunflowers were just something to fill her unhappy days until her abusive husband came home. Two realities, Two truths.

My mother has been dead almost 3 weeks now. One of my godchildren came over with her mother to to drop off some flowers and pay their respects. My godchild had in her sweet hands, a bunch of sunflowers! I blinked back tears.

“Oh I love sunflowers!,” I sad as I hugged her and her momma, and I do. I love sunflowers – they are the flower of my childlife.

I love my mother, and I grieve her loss ,and our story. Rest in peace, Mommy.

And I love the life I’ve built where i am seen known and heard – for the most part and a good deal of the time..

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