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I had never known grief like the kind I experienced with the passing of my mother. While I am not writing about that exactly, I felt like I lost an anchor to my womanhood when my mother passed away, a marker of femininity for such a long time. My first encounter with womanhood was watching my mother and being in her presence. This did not mean watching her cook, clean, or perform any tasks associated with being a mother of a family, for me it was watching her exist and move in the world.
As a writer, I would hope to encapsulate what that means, but anyone in close proximity to their mother or a mother figure in their lives might understand that ephemeral sense of movement. My mother moved with a grace and speed that I had never and will never encounter again. Maybe one day I will encounter it within my own self, but it was different witnessing her own motherhood.
Womanhood is a nuance. It is a category that is curated through cultural, biological, and political gestures and ways of being. It is a practice of observing the women around you and being affected by them and affecting them; not merely in the performative sense or in the process of them getting ready in the everyday or makeup or hair – even though those are all remarkable and cathartic practices – it is in the relations, the way we present ourselves, talk back and talk loudly. It’s in perseverance, grit, and how we get up time and again. It is a practice of becoming.
The saying “it takes a village” appropriately underscores this nuance of becoming. Most women will always point to their village when asked how they do it. For me, even though my village has taken different forms throughout the years, it is always those women who have paved the way.
It’s difficult to think of how much of my femininity is somehow anchored on that of another woman. I turned 25 and began to reflect on how my journey of becoming a woman thus far was complicated and nuanced in a way that I did not expect it to be. I had to carve my own way to it, my own definition of what it means to be a woman. It was not a transactional process of buying new clothes and wearing makeup, while it involved some of that, it ran deeper and it’s harder to translate.
What did I actually want to express and what did I actually know about it? Was my womanhood compromised and relegated to a different way of expressing my femininity?
As a feminist, I questioned what that meant for my own life, especially in a society where a woman’s value is contingent on her physical appearance. I could claim and voice that womanhood is a process, I could read theory upon theory about the process of womanhood, but my reflexivity did not withstand the loss of my mother.
Who was I supposed to turn to? Who was to guide me and hold my hand as I moved from my teen years to my troubling 20s? I had to turn inward and question my own world, and my own expression of it.
Grieving complicates all our life forms, our processes of becoming and what that means takes different shapes as you lean into your grief. Anyone that has experienced the loss of a loved one knows of the shapeshifting and questioning of your identity that occurs, frequently and consistently as you move and live with your grief. As far as I understand, that process never stops, and you grow with it and you get angry at it from time to time, but you understand that adjusting your sails becomes easier than trying to rip them apart and throw them to the depths of the ocean.
You become a creative mastermind and you test your memory every time they cross your mind, moving between trying to convince yourself that you are good at forgetting them but then questioning why you feel like their memory has faded.
The time passes and moves beside you. You can sit and calculate every waking moment that has passed by without them being by your side, focusing so intently on the bigger milestones and how large the numbers have gotten. One is much easier than seven it seems, and you were once questioning your body’s ability to deliver you to a time in the future where it has been seven years since you lost your loved one. It has been seven years since I have lost my mother, and it coincides with me turning 25.
For me, the numbers are shocking because the pain surmounts the relevance of these numbers. I can invent any number on the spot when I think of “how long has it been” and I count on my fingers and then start wondering about the brutality of time and numbers and whether I had ever been that good at math and whether I can count the years and the days.
I turn 25 and I find that my womanhood took shapes and forms and turns. It was something that no one had spoken to me about before and something I found difficult to formulate. I found this process of questioning my womanhood most pertinent and specific. It was not the same as when I was 14 and angry at society and questioning why men can readily harass me in the street and why women were assaulted and raped. It was a different questioning of womanhood, and it was not anger at the world as much as confusion.
I was lucky to have witnessed my mother for as long as I did. I was lucky and will always be the luckiest person in the world because I was her daughter once and that identity can never fade. I’ll hold onto it with my teeth, gnawing at its seams and tying it around my neck. I’ll hold onto it for dear life, even if much of it has faded over time.
Celebrating my mother feels now like a celebration of womanhood. A celebration of what once was for me and what it means to have once been her daughter. Nothing replaces a loved one once they pass. The grief can be reprimanded with their memory, their recipes, pictures, memorabilia, and any mnemonic object that is left of them, but the relationality is transformed once they pass, and it continues to transform you until you do. It is the reality of living, and it is the cost of loving someone dearly and missing them fondly. ‘
When you go through a tragedy, you try to scream to the world to see what happened to you, to derive some solace from the pain and from someone else’s validation of that pain. I had the conviction for the longest time that losing a mother is the most painful loss to ever exist.
It was my experience and my sought for validation of that pain that drove me to that conviction. It felt like I had to compete, and I was ready to compete with anyone who would argue that other losses or tragedies were worse. It is the combination of losses that you go through after you lose your mother that drives you to the ground, or at least drove me to the ground (and possibly insanity for some time).
I took pages from my mother’s handbook but even those had been worn out by the time I needed them. Like at the cusp of 18, an age filled with hilarity because I thought I was a mature adult and that I could see the world for what it was. I will also revisit 25 sometime down the line, questioning what I believed was the epitome of adulthood.
Years before her passing, I saw my mom mourn my grandma, but I guess I did not pay enough attention. I don’t know how she got out of bed for the first week, how she spoke to others, how she continued to hold onto a silver lining, and I don’t know how she continued to live after that. I was not paying enough attention and I did not know that I needed to start preparing my own first aid kit for when it happens.
Who would have thought? I thought she was invincible and immortal, but somehow even though I thought I would never be able to live with my grief, I did.
I lived to see the day where I celebrated turning 25 (frontal lobe developed and all). I lived to see the day where laughing did not feel like a chore and seeking happiness was not an attempt at covering up a lie.
Grief begs you to make space for it and so does becoming a woman. To both, you need the space and the grace to welcome them with open arms and greet them at the door. Give them a guest room and know that they will be a loud, messy but wonderful guest. You’ll laugh with them, cry with them, and watch comedy movies expecting to laugh but then cry your heart out because there was a scene with a mother and her daughter. You’ll wake up the next morning and have a cup of coffee together out in the balcony in the sun and you’ll find a pace that matches you both. You’ll dread the times when you cry your heart out and eventually learn that it takes time to move with both.
Nothing can ever replace a mother or a parent for that matter. That love, I believe, comes once in our lifetime and it’s usually (hopefully) enough to have us survive the storm that is life. My womanhood is not only made possible because of what my mother taught or instilled within me, it was something effervescent and I have a hard time transcribing it. It is a process of grieving her motherhood and reinnervating my sense of selfhood and womanhood despite her loss.