The Women September Brings Back to Me
An open Bible, flesh colored ceramic praying hands with a brown robe, and Lorna Doone cookies rest on a wooden table in warm light.
September holds two birthdays that still belong to women who are no longer here.
My mom, Rhonda, was born on September 16. My grandma, Geneva, was born on September 23.
Birthdays were never a big production for either of them. There weren’t elaborate traditions or special cakes that had to appear every year. Their birthdays were mostly treated like regular days.
When I was an adult, I started taking my mom Lorna Doone cookies for hers.
She loved those cookies, but she always seemed surprised when I showed up with them. She would smile, hug me tightly, thank me, and open the package. Then she would share them with me.
I brought the cookies for her, but we ate them together.
That is the kind of thing I miss.
Not a birthday celebration. Not a perfectly planned family gathering.
Just sitting with my mom, sharing the cookies I had brought her, and watching her enjoy being remembered.
Sunday Afternoons With Grandma
When I picture Grandma, she isn’t celebrating a birthday.
She is cooking after church on Sunday.
I can see myself rolling out the dough for chicken and dumplings and cutting it with a butter knife. I loved cutting that dough. It was a small job, but it made me feel like I was helping her make something that belonged to our family.
I remember making cakes with her.
I remember sitting beside her in church on Sunday morning.
I remember sitting at the table while she showed me how to write a check. Once she knew I could do it, she would hand me a list of the checks she needed written.
She taught me, then she trusted me to do it.
That was Grandma.
She taught me how to cook, pay bills, manage a household, work a job, make money, and take responsibility for my own life. She taught me that taking care of a family and earning a living were both important. She showed me that a woman could do both without believing she had to give every piece of herself away.
She taught me how to be a wife and mother because she showed me what caring for people looked like in ordinary life.
There was no speech.
There was Sunday dinner, a checkbook, a kitchen table, and dough waiting to be cut.
When I think of Grandma, I think of love. I think of security. I think of something warm and cozy.
She was my person.
Grandma died on February 11, 1997. I was pregnant with my daughter, who was born on March 14.
Grandma knew I was having a girl, and she was excited. My son Nic had been her first great grandchild. Now another girl was coming into a family that had seen a long stretch of boys.
She didn’t get to meet my daughter.
I hate that she missed her by such a small amount of time.
I also wish my daughter could have known what it felt like to sit beside Grandma at church, make a cake with her, or stand in her kitchen cutting dumpling dough with a butter knife.
But I know that much of the mother I became came from Grandma.
My daughter may not have met her, but she was raised by some of the things Grandma placed in me.
Loving My Mom Honestly
My mom and I had a different relationship.
She wasn’t always the best mother, and she knew that.
I can say that without pretending I didn’t love her. I can love my mom and still tell the truth about the ways she disappointed me.
She taught me to be strong. She taught me to be resilient and not take shit off people. She taught me that it was okay not to be okay.
She also showed me the kind of mother I didn’t want to be.
Later, she showed me the kind of grandmother I didn’t want to be. She had the title, but she wasn’t consistently present in the role.
That is part of our story too.
Understanding some of the reasons behind my mom’s choices helped me put much of the past behind me. It did not make everything okay, but I reached a place where I didn’t need to keep dragging it behind me.
We were close.
When she needed care, I became her primary caregiver.
Grandma taught me that you take care of your family, but I didn’t care for my mom because I felt trapped by that lesson. I didn’t do it simply because she was my mother and I thought I had no choice.
I cared for her because I loved her.
That love didn’t require me to rewrite our history. It didn’t require me to pretend she had always been the mother I needed.
It only required me to show up as the daughter I wanted to be.
There were also beautiful moments between my mom and my grandson.
One day, I surprised her by taking him to her house. He wasn’t talking yet, but he was babbling. She would talk to him, and he would babble back as if they were having a real conversation.
I have pictures and videos from that day.
It was a lovely day for both of us.
Another time, my mom was spending the day at my house. My grandson has always been partial to his Nana. He didn’t willingly leave me to go to other people.
But that day, he went to her.
She cradled him, and he fell asleep in her arms.
She never let me forget it.
I have pictures of that day too.
Those moments were real. So were the harder parts.
One truth doesn’t have to cancel out the other.
My mom could be absent in important ways and still hold my grandson tenderly while he slept. She could make mistakes as a mother and still be someone I loved deeply enough to care for at the end of her life.
Families are rarely as simple as we make them sound when we try to explain them.
Grief on an Ordinary Day
I think about my mom and Grandma on their birthdays, but that usually isn’t when the grief comes.
Grief doesn’t seem especially interested in the calendar.
It shows up when I see something one of them would have liked. It appears through food, a song, a caregiving memory, or the sudden urge to tell one of them something.
Sometimes I don’t want a conversation or an answer.
I just want a long hug.
I want to hear their voices again.
Grandma’s Bible is with our other Bibles in the office. Her ceramic praying hands are in the curio cabinet in my living room. I still have her recipe for Strawberry Nut Cake, although it has been a few years since I made it.
I can see the praying hands whenever I walk through the living room.
I can take her Bible off the shelf.
I can make the cake again.
I can watch the pictures and videos of my mom with my grandson. I can buy a package of Lorna Doone cookies.
I am grateful for all of those things.
But none of them can hug me back.
None of them sound like their voices.
By the time September 30 arrives, both birthdays have passed for another year.
I will have thought about the dates and remembered the women connected to them. Then September will end, and life will keep moving.
The missing won’t end with the month.
Neither will what they gave me.
Grandma is still there when I take care of my family, manage my home, pay the bills, work, cook, and try to be someone the people I love can depend on.
My mom is there in my strength, my resilience, and my refusal to let anyone walk over me. She is also there in the choices I make differently because I know what it feels like when a mother or grandmother is present in name but not in the ways that matter.
They shaped me differently.
I miss them differently too.
If I could have one more afternoon with them, I wouldn’t need a birthday celebration.
I would sit beside Grandma while she cooked after church. I would roll out the dumpling dough and cut it into strips with a butter knife.
Then I would sit with my mom, hand her a package of Lorna Doone cookies, and watch her look surprised all over again.
I would let her share them with me.
And before I left, I would ask each of them for one long hug.
With Love from Mabank,
Brandy
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