November 20, 2023

Last week, there was a woman ahead of me in the cashier line at our little grocery store. She was tall with impeccable posture and regal despite her haphazard bun leaking round the sides of a clip and a vintage blouse that had seen too many washings. She reminded me of my father’s mother. A woman who was a giantess for her time—six feet tall—rangy, and always too thin. I don’t have fond memories of this grandmother, I can remember on 3 fingers the times I saw her. My most pungent memories of her are the stories told about the unspeakable abuse she heaped on her children all in the name of Jesus.

But despite this legacy of memory, I smiled at this woman as she coped with overseeing groceries and a portly man in a wheelchair. She was easily the age my mother would be. I smiled but at the same time I was overcome with a longing to see and speak to my mother again. A longing I couldn’t remember feeling since just after her death. The same mother I shared a troubled relationship and who was the root cause of my anxious attachment style. But she was my mother and the wound has healed over long gone to a scar I can see and only rarely troubles me. I think it was an easier wound to heal than the wounds my mother suffered and never healed from.