(Note: I wrote this while the site was ‘down’, but could save it thanks to the Internet Archive.)

Dear purveyors of Mother’s Day crap: I hope you all get hit by a bus.

I tried really hard last week to avoid becoming the Ghost of Mother’s Day Past around the office. (This is terrible, and don’t think less of me, but I’ve been jokingly calling it Black Mother’s Day. Sometimes if you can’t laugh you’re screwed.) People would complain about having to go home for the weekend or how they forgot to buy their Mom something or whatever, and I would have to resist rattling my chains and proclaiming things like, “Hug your mother!”, and, “She doesn’t need flowers, she just wants to know you’re thinking of her!”

Honestly, though, if I can survive last week I think I can survive anything. Bring on a nuclear winter — it’ll be the me and the cockroaches sitting in the fallout, and I’ll be telling them, “You think this is tough, you try losing your Mom suddenly a few weeks before Mother’s Day. This is easycakes. Now pass me some fricken irradiated beer.”

I used to send flowers to Mom’s office every Mother’s Day. I could have sent them to her at home on Sunday, but I knew that she liked getting them at work (I would try and send something ostentatious) so she had an excuse to talk about her awesome kids to her co-workers. Anyway, happy Mother’s Day. I miss you like crazy.

Don’t really feel like talking to anyone this week. I don’t know. What can you do, right? I say that to myself all the time. There’s nowhere else to go with that line of thought.

I had a really good cry this weekend, and I didn’t feel any less than I did the night she died. I happen to be the queen of freaking out and then picking myself back up again with renewed zeal for doing things right, but there is no right to get to now. My inner self is rather flummoxed.

God knows Mom just handled many things she didn’t want to, because that was just how she was. So I just.. suck it up and move on. “I have a meeting at 8:30 tomorrow, and I miss Mom.” “I think I’ll order pizza, and I miss Mom.” “Let’s go see a movie, and I miss Mom.”

I don’t know. What can you do, right?

I went back to work for a couple of days last week. In my email inbox was the last few months of communication with Mom, including a really funny chatty email she sent me on Tuesday, April 4th. The last line is, “If you came over this Easter weekend I would hide chocolate eggs for you in the daffodils ”.

I printed the email out and last week I was sitting in my cube at work reading this final missive and I was suddenly so angry. Why should this be the last communication? It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair! I had this urge to grab the printout and start tearing it into tiny bits and jump on it and pound it with my fists and eat the beaten shreds. I want more. God freaking dammit, I’m not done talking to her yet.

I didn’t flip out and start smashing things at the office, of course, but for a short time there I wanted to more than anything else in the world. I imagine all my sadness and anger as this little hard ball of brilliant white light, and as I told Adrian the only way to function is to put it in a box for now and maybe take it out and play with it on rainy weekends.

I carry that printout around with me in my handbag now and every so often when I really need to hear from Mom I pull it out and read it. It’s the last letter I’ll ever get from her, and I’m going to make every word count.

There are many sensible things that currently make me cry. Old letters and photos, sad memories, talking with my family.. these all make sense.

Then there are the stupid things that make me cry now. It’s silly, and I feel goofy doing it, but there you go. So, because Mom loved a good laugh, a list:

Stupid Things That Make Me Cry

Television ads for 24
I haven’t watched 24 since the first season, but Mom did, and when asked about it she would rant about how stupid it was and how she wasn’t going to watch the next season. And then she would. Yes, the ticking 24 clock makes me teary.

The movie “Grindhouse”
“*sniff* My mother would have *sob* totally hated this movie!”

Cat barf
In the last conversation I had with Mom, we talked about how one of my cats had taken to projectile vomiting off the top of the dressers. Now watching the cat barf in my underwear drawer makes me even more sad than usual.

Beatles songs
This is my most goofy “sad moment”: sitting in my study, crying my eyes out and singing along to Rocky Raccoon. Seriously, the whole pantheon of Beatles songs make me sad right now, but I chose to utterly break down to Rocky Raccoon. (Damn you, Nancy and Dan, for your illicit and soothingly rhyme-y romance!) Then I started to feel ridiculous, and that made me cry some more. Then I decided to stop listening to music and go for a walk.