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I had just turned twenty-one and was barely a month out of college when my mom died. I was still high from my accomplishment when her cancer came out of remission and she was hospitalized for the final time. I was just getting to the point in my life in which I actually saw her as a person and not just my mother, but still didn’t know how to let her know that. I remember talking to her right after the doctor told her the cancer was back – she started to cry, said that it wasn’t fair, and hung up the phone. She died a few weeks later.

When I was packing up our house, I came across notebook after notebook filled with short stories and poetry she had written before she got married and had me. I didn’t know that she had been so interested in writing until then. I sat down in the basement and read the notebooks by the florescent track lighting my father had installed years earlier. Through her writing, I began to get an idea of who my mother was – what she liked, what she dreamed about, what she wanted out of life. I saw her in a new light. She was the mother who understood the value of reading and the value of creativity. She was the mother who gave up her career dreams to marry and stay at home with her child because that was what she was taught women were supposed to do. She was the mother who wanted more for me – she wanted me to have what she didn’t have herself.

A few years later, I came across those notebooks again as I was packing to make yet another move. The thirty-year old pages were yellowed and tattered. My mother’s ideas stayed written there in blue and black ink, frozen in time.


My mom, 18 years old (1971)