Are You My Mother?

Ever since my mom died, I find myself looking around at older women with this perception leaking from my needy brown eyes. I find myself grasping them, looking to them for support, encouragement, and someone to talk to or simply bounce ideas off from. I even so much as saw a few women at church this week who looked roughly like her and around that age, that I don't even know, and just wanted to go up to them and grasp them with a big hug, half expecting them to feel and smell like my mom and respond in the same way. I need that.

Truly, I found myself in Barnes & Noble last week just to find this children's book (Are You My Mother?) and read it, because this theme keeps bobbling up and around and in me. In referencing the book, it was less connecting to me than what I thought it was, but the phrase remains the repeating same.




I look at my aunts, my sister, my friend from Calvin High School, my Crossroads Community women, my old youth pastor's wife, my counselor, my Stephen's Minister... Like the toddler with big, looming brown eyes, asking "Are You My Mother?"

I know none of them are not. I know I cannot put these expectations or needs on anyone. I know it is a gap that cannot be filled. But it doesn't mean that I don't whole heartily search for someone to fill her shoes, wishing so much that she was here and I could actually hug her and feel her and ask her my life questions and wrestle through it with her. I know she is the only one that is My Mother. But I miss her so much, still, that the question haunts and remains in me, as I look for other women, asking, wishing, someone could answer yes, but knowing no one can to:

Are You My Mother?