By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann

I started crying on May 6th.  The day after I sat at my kitchen table with my daughter’s friends’ moms—two women I’d never met before—to plan a joint graduation party for the girls. I’d already asked another friend to help me out, I’m not good at this, I’d said. My friend willingly agreed, then came to look at my backyard to assess the space, the way an interior designer might walk into my living room and instead of accepting the old couch and bookshelf as pragmatic, she envisions a plan and a purpose—delight even?—far beyond what I have settled for. From my friend’s suggestions, I add a balloon arch and pink sequined tablecloths into an online basket, and then with the other moms around my table, I look up sandwich platter options. The three girls decided they will make their own cupcakes. We expect over a hundred people to stop by. 

***

Cement. Dark, grey, rough. Cold, fixed, harsh. Immovable. Now you have a sense of what my graduation party was like. My mother had planned it with the help of her friends, I suppose, and my aunts, I imagine. Though who knows. I was busy with my own friends and the last weeks of my senior year of high school, which I didn't know—how could I have known if no one told me?—were also the last weeks of my mother’s life. 

The day was gray and rainy and cold. The tables that were to line the backyard were moved into our garage, with the food now inside the house. My dad was not happy, in a mood, I’d have said. Which will happen, I guess, when your home is hosting Lord knows how many people to celebrate your daughter’s graduation all while your wife is two miles down the road, lying in a bed she will die on four days from now.

But we didn’t know she’d die then, four days later, four days before my actual graduation. At the party, I only knew that five days earlier, she’d asked me “What day is it?” and I’d said “Thursday.” She’d lifted her hands in the air, and waited for a moment, either summoning the strength or the focus. Then with one hand, she ticked off her fingers in deliberate motions. The tip of her left pointer finger to the tip of her right one. One, Friday. The tip of her left pointer finger to the tip of her right middle finger. Two, Saturday. Ring finger, three, Sunday. Pinky, four, Monday. And then she nodded—in agreement? in willingness?—before folding her arms back down to her chest, and closing her eyes to go back to sleep. 

People came and went, offered me their cards with checks written out in cursive. Congratulations, they said and we all smiled at each other, none of us mouthing the words we didn’t know how to say. So I instead said, Thank you, thank you for coming. Did anyone think one week later, we would repeat these same motions at her funeral—wan smiles, hugs, showing up when you don’t want to—everything the same minus gifts of money.

When the party was over, ladies from church stayed to clean up the house and my family returned to the hospice center. There, I sat on the carpeted floor of her room and counted up the checks—over a thousand dollars, I said to my dad. He tried to smile. And I understood. There’s only so much positive emotion you can show when you wait for a person you love to die.   

***

I started crying on May 6th, the day after my daughter and I got in a fight about her prom. Not over the cost of her dress or shoes or how to do her hair. Maybe it was about her curfew or the party she wanted to go to afterwards. But maybe it was really about me not knowing how to let her go, all while she’s in tears and I’m telling her to get over herself. 

You’re allowed to go to prom. 
Do you realize I was not?
I paid for your dress. 
I had to buy my own. 
You’re allowed to have a boyfriend. 
I wasn’t. 

I say none of this. But my daughter says, you’re not being normal, and why don’t you trust me? and the other parents don’t do this. I almost laughed at her, because even as the words came out of her mouth, it was as if I was in the living room in which I grew up, saying the exact same words to my mom.  

***

My prom dress was a black satin floor-length gown with a lapelled-V back. It cinched at the waist with a small rhinestone-buckled belt. I had asked a teacher who I knew wore clip-on earrings if I could borrow some from her. I wasn’t allowed to get my ears pierced. Days later, she’d handed me a jewelry box with matching earrings and necklace that went perfectly with my dress. 

I paid for the dress myself—one hundred and thirty-six dollars. The hem was uneven, so the sales lady gave me ten percent off, though now I wonder if it was actually a small train. I wore shoes I already owned, and the borrowed jewelry from my teacher. She refused to take them back, just keep them, she’d said, even after I thanked her and told her they were perfect, but that they were hers. Just keep them, she’d said again. I won’t wear them, she’d told me. Weeks afterward, a friend would tell me she saw this teacher in the jewelry section of our local department store in the days leading up to prom. 

My parents forbade me to go to prom. It was against the rules of the church I grew up in. No drinking or swearing or card playing—standard fare for conservative circles. Women sat segregated from the men, we didn’t wear jewelry or make up, but wore head coverings and dresses to church. No dating, no dancing, and one would be excommunicated if you had sex before marriage. 

But I wanted to go to prom. I wanted one normal American experience, I’d yelled at my mom. I would go with my boyfriend, although I didn’t call him that then. He was also from our church, and I don’t know this made things better or worse for me. I loved this young man who would later become my husband, and I think he already loved me. My mother, from Serbia, just shook her head when she realized how much I liked him because she knew one of his parents was from Switzerland, and she understood how hard it is to mix hot and cold. 

After weeks of fighting about the dance, my dad eventually shrugged his shoulders. Was it because I was eighteen, I now wonder. He’d said, What are you going to do, Violet? to my mom, Block the door? almost mocking her determination. She, in a bathrobe—this was before she went to hospice—back when she was losing weight but not yet under a hundred pounds, before death was an idea I thought conceptually, or eventually, let alone literally. She turned from me to him, and with sadness and shock and resolve, said, “Yes.”

I’d laughed at her and walked upstairs to my room. 

***

Is this the fate of every generation of mothers and daughters? To know each other so completely and also to not know? To disconnect and push away? To desire and pursue—to hurt each other in the process of this necessary separation? I want nothing more than a relationship with my daughter. To get through this season without irreparable rupture or permanent damage. 

What I broke with my mother in those last weeks, months, years, only I can repair now. She’s past it, over it, beyond. 

Yet I’m making the same mistakes almost all mothers make. Of not knowing how to let your oldest become. Of holding too tight to the string you must let go of, the one that even as you hold it, you know, that when you do let go, it already binds you two together forever. 

***

Before our last Mother’s Day, I walked into a store to buy my mom a card and right there amongst the pastel pinks and opalescent purples, realized my mother was dying. This will be the last card I’ll give to her, I’d thought. I read each one, wanting—needing—to find a message that said what I needed it to say. But they all left me sick to my stomach: she wasn’t my best friend, wasn’t always supportive, wasn’t going to be ‘there for me’ much longer.  

The card I picked out was honest. It thanked her for being my mom. And I hope she read between the lines: I loved her, I didn’t know how to be yet, I was trying my best.

And because I wanted her to think, to know, that I would be okay, that I could do something responsible and mature, I drove to a different store to buy her what I thought was a gift that reflected my adulthood—a fifty-dollar set of knives. 

***

I started crying on May 6th, a week before Mother’s Day, which will be the day after my daughter’s prom, which I am allowing her to go to, even though she isn’t talking to me right now. 

For so many years on Mother's Day, I haven’t known what to do with myself. Or with the kids. Will I be happy or sad? Okay or not okay? This year, I’ve already decided. I want to go for a hike in the mountains with my husband and four kids. To be outside, moving my body, in proof to myself and the earth that I exist. I need for us to be together, even if my daughter will be tired and grumpy and my other kids will complain. Maybe my husband has already made dinner reservations for that night. Maybe I’ll get upset that he hasn’t. Maybe I’ll be frustrated that my kids don’t realize how good their life is—that they still have a mom. 

Maybe I’ll just be so damn happy it’s my daughter’s senior year, that she’s graduating, and that I am alive to see it. 

Sonya Spillmann is a nurse, an essayist, and freelance writer living in the DC area with her husband and four kids. She's incapable of small talk, loves red lipstick, and spends the majority of her afternoons driving children around in her minivan. You can read more through her Substack, Finding Feathers. 

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.