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Samhain, or Halloween, marks the end of the year if you’re Wiccan. Our household is, so this is our New Year’s Eve. It is a time of remembering. Remembering the year that has come and is going, and the lessons that year has taught us. It is also the time of year for remembering the dead, those loved ones that have gone before us. This year I am finally able to say goodbye and hello to my mother. She died when I was six and if you hear me tell the tale, it is told quickly, unemotionally, almost matter of factly. I grew up with this story, this fact, so in a way it is matter of fact. It’s just one of the truths of my childhood. Nothing more, nothing less.

As I sat in sacred space tonight I realized that I have always concentrated on my mother’s death, not her life. I knew she was the pretty one. I knew she’d been a basketball player in high school, so a jock. I knew she’d wanted to be a country and western singer. I knew she’d wanted to act and be in the movies. I knew she had talked about opening her own beauty shop. I knew she and I were talking about a vacation to Disney Land. I found out many years after she had died that her trip to take me to Disney had also been planned to try and get me in the movies. After she died, a photographer called our house and told my grandmother that the pictures were ready. My Grandmother didn’t know about any new pictures of me. When my grandmother showed them to me as an adult I knew immediately what the black and white photos were, because on the back of them was hair color: brown, eye color: brown, height, my stats, my resume as if I were an actress. I took dance lessons every week and I was about to start piano lessons when my mother died. After her death there wasn’t money for either so the lessons stopped, but those professionally done resume photos spoke volumes to me. It let me know that my mother hadn’t given up her dream of being in the movies, she was just going to live the dream through me. I was terribly shy at the age of six, and my first dance recital was a terrifying expeirence of stage fright and freezing up at the beginning of the dance number. My mother never got stage fright, and had presence that I would not acquire for many years. I certainly didn’t have it at age six. But she had a plan, and she did the research, and she never shared the plan with anyone in the family. Just those pictures of me with the stats on the back, and a plan to take me to California to Disney Land. That little bit of story said that there was more to my mother than I knew, or than most of the family knew.

I’ve been reading people’s posting on Tweeter and especially FaceBook, because it has longer posts. People have been talking about their mother being their best friend. That even after her death they find themselves picking up the phone to share news, milestone moments, with her. I never had that. I believe I told my grandmother that I sold my first short story, and my first book, but after that not so much. She seemed more puzzled than proud. I am told she showed my books to everyone that came in the door, but to me she played it down. She seemed always worried that I’d get a big head about something, so praise was very sparse. I never saw her as my friend, she was the only parent I had, but she never made sharing my triumphs with her very satisfying so I learned not to try. I was my own cheerleader. I was my own goal setter. My own strategist for getting where I needed to go. I became very good at researching everything from how to format a short story in a professional manner to what classes I needed for college. If my mother had lived would she have done all this with me? I don’t know.

Today for the first time I let myself think that my mother would have loved my daughter, Trinity. My mother was a social butterfly and so is my daughter. I guess some things really do skip a generation. Trinity wanted dance lessons and had them for more years than I did. She wanted to be in musical theater and I realize that my mother would have come down, out of state, to see Trinity in her first production. It was “Children of Eden”. I didn’t miss her that night, because it never occurred to me to think of her that night. It really didn’t. Trinity is taking voice lessons, and tonight I realized how happy that would have made my mother with her own dreams of stardom, and her plan to put me on that track. Trinity has done this all on her own. I was a drama and speech team geek in high school and very early college, but writing was always my greater passion. Trinity has both bugs. She asked to start piano lessons this year, and she’s doing well. Again, my mother would have been thrilled. Probably, I honestly don’t know for sure. But I think she would have liked that her granddaughter seems to want to chase that dream that once was hers. Trinity decided on the stage as a dream without knowing that her dead grandmother had once had her heart set on it. But, like I said, I guess somethings skip a generation.

For the first time I let myself realize that I might have had a friend that I could call and share my life with if my mother had lived. That she might have been thrilled with each success of mine, and of my daughter. That here might have been someone that I could have shared my life with in a positive normal way. My grandmother, her mother, raised me to concentrate on the death, the tragedy. Not her life, not the promise that might have been, but the grief, and loss. That was what my grandmother was about, always, the negative. It is only this Samhain that I’ve been able to open my mind and heart to the possibilities that might have been if my mother hadn’t died in a car accident so suddenly that summer. I think if it had occurred to me earlier, to understand all that I had lost, it would have been crushing, but apparently it was time. Time for me to look at the joy I missed, and not just the sorrow I had. It isn’t enough to remember the good times I had for those few short years with my mother. I needed to look at all the positives that I could have had in my life that I lost with her. I am not sad about it, though. I never had anyone in my life to fulfill that role that she might have had, so I didn’t miss it. Just as I didn’t miss having a father. You can’t miss what you never had, or at least I couldn’t. But this night, I can think about it, feel it, puzzle over it. Tonight I can let myself think that my mother would have really loved having a granddaughter like Trinity, and that I might have had a best friend and cheerleader my whole life long. Or maybe we would have clashed, fought, and I would have struggled to escape her frustrated dreams of stardom when they were not my own. Who can say? But regardless, I know she would have loved her granddaughter, and it would have been interesting to see how much alike they were, or even how much like my mother that I was. I look very much like her, so much so that people who knew her when she died, and me only as a child, will recognize me, or even call me by her name. We look alike, but how much alike we might have been, or might be, in personality I can’t say. I’ve never had any member of the family tell me I’m like my mother, except in the way I look. I don’t think our personalities are that similar, but I watch my daughter and I wonder how much of my mother is walking around my house? Trinity is very much her own person, but would there be mannerisms, expressions that would remind me of my mother if I remembered enough of them? No way to know, really, but tonight, for the first time, I can let myself think that there might be, and I’m able to be glad about it, not sad. Because even without my mother having ever known about Trinity, she is still her granddaughter, there is still a little piece of her walking around, growing up, dreaming her own dreams. The fact that some of those dreams are the same dreams that my mother had is just one of the many things that make me wonder if I would look at my daughter and see my mother in her, if I knew enough of my mother to know where to look.

Happy Samhain everyone. I hope it was as enlightening, as comforting, to you as it was to me. I shed some tears, but they were mostly happy tears. I can look at my loss, and remember that once I had a mother who loved me very much and who would have really loved to meet her granddaughter and her son-in-law, and to be a part of our life.