Tracy Laulhere

The Loving Litany of Who We Had Been

My parents sold my childhood home when I was 26 years old. Though I hadn’t lived there for eight years, I felt betrayed, like something intimate had been ripped away from me. Perhaps my childhood, or maybe just my status as a child. At the time, my mom was younger than I am now. I don’t recall thinking much about her experience of moving or of her children never living at home again. I assume she was happy, or anxious, or sad; I assume she moved on, or reconnected with my dad, or otherwise stayed busy. I don’t know for sure, and I cannot ask her. She is three years into her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disorder and she doesn’t remember that home.

When I was a child, my mom would often say that she hoped I someday had a daughter just like myself. In some ways I did: my daughter is stubborn and impatient, she is sarcastic and passionate, she loves music and dogs. She is also so many things that I am not: self-assured and independent and fierce. She is everything and everywhere and will fill up many homes in her lifetime.

My mom and my daughter have a caring but superficial relationship. My daughter doesn’t remember a version of her grandmother before dementia. She sits and listens to simple stories on repeat; I can see she yearns to be elsewhere. To my mom, my daughter is perpetually a little girl, taking walks together to look for butterflies. I envy my mom in the way she is so clearly in that moment of time. She doesn’t see the growing woman in front of her, leaving just the shadow of the little girl.

I try to see my mom as she is now but I hardly recognize this woman. My mother was opinionated, had panic attacks, quit smoking cold turkey, sent me type-written, multi-page letters when I went to college. The smell of her Tabu perfume entered a room before she did; she insisted my friends call her by her first name. The woman who sits across from me today is sweet, hardly anxious at all, decorates her house with stickie notes to offload her memories.

I look at my daughter and I am so overwhelmed by and in love with the person she is becoming that I struggle to remember the little girl she was. I have thousands of photographs to remind me of virtually every moment of her life, and yet my head and heart ache to look at them. They are mementos of a beautiful past but not a portal to that time and place and person; instead, they are reminders of what will never be again. My fifteen year old daughter doesn’t let me hold her hand, but even so, it wouldn’t be the same hand of that little girl, constantly reaching up to me for support. Our relationship is different now.

I have premonitions of the next few years. Of a long goodbye with my mom: doctors offices, birthdays, forgetting, sadness, love. Of high school with my daughter: new friends, homework, dances, heartbreak, texting, love. And of myself: standing by the sidelines, watching and waiting, clinging to each embrace, love. Always love.