It is mother’s day
again,
and I am thinking of her
again.

Not that there is ever a day
I don’t think about my mom.

I write on Facebook:
“If Mother’s Day is hard for you,
you’re not alone.
Take care of yourself today.”

It is my mantra when
this holiday rolls around,

and my cousin responds:
“Go do something that she would want to do.”

So.
I take myself to Safeway,
buy peaches and butter,
return home to bake a cobbler.

This is not because my mother loved to bake
(which she didn’t)
or that she was incredible in the kitchen
(cause she definitely was not),
but I know that my mom …

… would have eaten the shit
out of a peach cobbler.

She had a love of food
that went unrivaled,
as was her love of everything in life.

What’s more,
I bake this cobbler knowing that
she would be proud of me
for making something out of nothing.

I have written dozens of poems
about my mom.
The good ones only
started showing up in the last five years.
My poems about her are always
laced with sadness,
heavy with mourning.
I think to myself
how this is a sin,
because my mother
was the happiest person.

Always a huge grin on her face;
a laugh that could rival a firework display.
She was the person at the party
everyone wanted to talk to;
the English teacher in all those
cliche inspirational films.
She loved my dad relentless
and would have left him
in a heartbeat for Tom Hanks.
She enjoyed Shakespeare,
Maya Angelou, John Irving,
and thought that Shrek was
the funniest film she had ever seen.

She was the sun, or rather, a galaxy,
and since her death
I am still trying to navigate my way back
to her solar system.

It is difficult to mourn someone
who was buried
over half a lifetime ago.
So easy to put a parent on a pedestal
when you never knew them as an adult.

I mourn fragments of a human,
all the what ifs, all the it could have beens.

I visit my mother’s grave today
for the first time in a year.
I sit on the ground and tell her
of my boyfriend, of poetry, of dogs.

Giving up on the concept of god means
giving up on the concept of life after death,
but damn, it still feels so nice to talk.

I leave her grave
and do not cry,
and I wonder if this
is what healing feels like.

To finally tuck her memory
where it does not hurt.
To not spend the day
in bleak mourning.

I know it’s what she’d want.

When I do not cry
I do not think
“bad” daughter,
“not sad enough” daughter,

I just think “daughter.”

So.
I watch a Tom Hanks movie.
I kiss a dog and smile.
I bake the shit out of a peach cobbler,

the aroma filling my house
with the sweetest scent,
something almost resembling her.