I close my eyes and in a moment I’m back- 11 years old, eyes bleary in the early morning hours, confusion on my face as I look around the living room. My grandma, my uncles, aunts and my dad, somber, tear-streaked. “Your mom…she died tonight.” The gut punch, the ice cold horror that washes over you in moments like this.

In the days to come, I was consumed. Not just by grief, but by regret. Remorse. Too young to comprehend it but wracked with the pain. You see, my mom had been sick for as long as I could remember. Multiple Sclerosis, MS, had her stumbling while I was in kindergarten. She got a cane when I was in 1st. By 5th grade she was wheelchair bound, and as 6th began the quadriplegia set in and she needed to be fed and showered. Her mind intact and alert, her body failing, and I was…furious. Watching the person you love most decline rapidly should make you empathetic, kind. Unless you’re a little girl terrified watching it happen, never fully understanding and not seeing where it was headed. All I knew was anger for the life I didn’t have…a mom to go spend time with. A mom to do my hair. A mom who could take me to the park. In my youth and naivete I saw only what I was losing, not what she was. So I argued. Like a teen girl, I argued. I was so angry with her for getting sick. For not fighting harder. And after she died? Angry at the world for taking her and at myself for not telling her I loved her. For not being patient. For not appreciating how much she loved me.

And for years, Mother’s Day was a fresh wound every year. Another reminder of the deep loss that losing a parent causes.

Then, one beautiful December day many years later, my newborn daughter was placed in my arms. And year after year that hole, that loss, fades, stitched together, healed by my own two children. Because I get to be theirs. I can’t be a daughter again, I can’t fix the anger and hurt and trauma I had as a child. But I get to be a mom. I get to love them as unrelentingly as my own mother did. I get to see glimpses of her in them, in the way my daughter reads insatiably to the clever way my son looks at the world. And in experiencing the all consuming love I have for my children, I forgive myself. I think to how my mom loved me, even through my hurt and disappointment and confusion during those years. And I choose to love myself again. To say I am enough…I am flawed, I am human, and I have made mistakes. But my mother’s love lives on through me, and now through my children. And, after so long, I am at peace.