Member-only story
A Phone Call From My Dead Mom
When your mother calls, you answer the phone. That’s how it works. That’s what you should do.
Except we know you don’t always answer, because maybe the relationship with your birth mom is complicated and maybe she did too many drugs, had too many problems.
Maybe her love felt like a heavy weight drowning you in the sea of life. Maybe she wasn’t the life raft you needed her to be while she was alive.
My mom died at 54, when I was 30, leaving me to process a grief that I’d been repressing most of my life. In some ways her death was a relief because once she was gone I could no longer desire for her to change.
In some ways her death left me the space in life to have my own children, which has brought about a whole slew of other complications, namely the fact that this grief is not completely healed and I miss my mom every day.
So when my mom calls me in a dream, I answer with the same enthusiasm I use to answer the “ringing” banana my toddler hands me. I answer the dream phone hoping it is her actual spirit calling from some other worldly place.
Once connected we talk and talk and I feel a kind of nostalgic warmth and a misplaced comfort. For a moment, mom and I are together and even though she struggled so much when she was alive, she was my mom and she loved me the…
