If I told you how many times I've yelled or cried that I want my mother in the last eighteen months, you'd cry too. If you knew the relationship I actually had with my mom, you'd probably think something about the universality of the mother-daughter bond, regardless of circumstances.
I don't think my mom actually liked me very much. That's a thing that I knew and then I forgot as soon as she got sick. And it's taken some time to get past some of the desperation of my wish to have her back for me to be able to remember it again.
I also don't think it matters much or made her a less great mother in any way, that maybe she didn't like me or understand me or whatever made things difficult between us. I don't think I'd miss her more if I had been as easy for her to get along with as my sister was. She raised me deliberately and lovingly and didn't play favorites.
I miss having a mother I could just take for granted. Who I could be mad at and find inadequate. I started missing that as soon as she got sick in October of 2006. But dropping that angst, realizing that I had to let go of that because I couldn't just take her for granted... certainly that made me a more emotionally stable person in general.
But I don't have any time to grieve right now or talk about her as a person beyond her relationship to me or to share any of the zillion other thoughts and realizations I've had about my own childhood and all of that since having a baby myself. Possibly, those are better kept in my own head anyway.
My baby just woke up and she is delightful and happy and I really like her and I hope I always will, and she needs me to go play with her until it's time for me to make her her lunch.
I hope she gets to take it for granted that I'll be right here for more than twenty-six years. I hope we get to know each other for more than twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years with your mother is not enough. Thirty-four wouldn't have been either.