During this tax season, I find myself hopeful and excited when I perhaps should not be but my naive heart just sees that I get money back each year so never mind what I have lost. On loss, this Saturday my mother would have been 75 years old, I used to be such a wreck about her passing and I still have my shower crying moments but the stillness of her no longer being a part of my worldly world has settled in I guess.
She did little things while she was alive, things to suggest she knew all too well that her death was imminent. Like the cute little bottle she bought me so long ago that reads “Kisses for Daughter” it looks to be a dutch inspired ceramic jar, the writing is blue, and has some splashes of some kind of pretty design. Inside this jar is a cotton ball of sorts, so tiny, and it was dipped in her perfume, the jar is plugged with a small cork so the smell has never seeped out. It’s both lovely and heartbreaking to unplug it and smell her scent, I keep this in a beautiful teacup she gave me.
The only thing I do not like about taxes each year is that each year I mark the dreaded “single” box, yea I am that kind of gal who just always wanted to mark “married” as if that defines me in some way, even though I know so many unhappy married folks it still appeals to me but also the responsible me loves taking care of this very important adult business. Have you ever taken that Strengths Finder Discovery test? It’s by @Gallup and can attest to the amazingness that this ‘course’ brought to my life. The learning and development team at my last job led the group session where you would take the test before and then submit your results and they had groups and we all learned and discussed our’ top 5 strengths’, again, I should get paid for this but it was so much fun!! One of my top 5 is (surprise!) ‘responsibility’ yea that is why I LOVE doing my taxes #sorrynotsorry, also in my top 5 was restorative and relator. I really am a very responsible person but tell that to my bank account.
I have been trying our churches and trying to ‘find myself’ as a newly single girl and have taken down some amazing notes, that is how I measure a good church, hell, a good experience (yes I said hell after mentioning church) is when I take notes and cry. I used to joke to my mother that I did not go to church because the last time I went I walked in and stopped and said to myself ‘Hm (sniff, sniff) I think I smell something burning, then looking down to see my feet on fire’. She always laughed, God I miss that laugh, all the teeth, the head jerking back, and the life that burst out of that laugh, she really was lovely. She was a mystery though, like I said I used to be a wreck but I have opened a pandora’s box of sorts about my parents, how they raised me, how they spoke to me, how I was ignored by mother, and how that affects me now as an adult, why I do the things I do, choose the things I do, choose the people I do…it’s sometimes awful, I mean I do not hate her, she is a mystery, much like life and death, that now I can never fully know, then again, she was such a mystery in life I most likely would have never scratched the surface should she have survived that morning.
“To hold the full mystery of life is always to endure its other half, which is the equal mystery of death and doubt. To know anything fully is always to hold that part of it which is still mysterious and unknowable.”
-Richard Rohr
