Mama

I'm a 45 year old grandmother.  My mother has been gone physically from my life for almost 5 years.

And she's still "Mama".

I spend a lot of my life living in her shadow because she was her own "rock star", in a sense.  I never went anywhere or did anything without  being identified as her daughter.  Certainly a benefit the majority of the time, but it does tend to steal a tad bit of your identify from you.  You get wrapped in a skin that doesn't necessarily belong to you.  I was "her daughter"

And she was  "mama".  I never would have said "my mama", just "mama".

For as loved as she was through her friends, her job, the strangers she embraced in every aspect of her life, she tended to keep me at arms length.  At 16, I felt so slighted, my cousin could visit and drive her car, but not her daughter.  That's how Mother and Daughter existed.

But she was "mama".

When I write, I have a tendency to speak as I type.  Hearing the words, starting off timid and weak, reaching a pattern.  Feeling the pauses a comma makes,  the words falling into thoughts.  The finality of a period at the end of a sentence.

And I hear "mama".

I'm well beyond that trick early grief plays where a phone rings and you think for one moment that it's going to be the voice you miss.  I don't wake up from a dream and feel that groggy wonderment that maybe this despair has been a dream.

But I hear my own voice speak "mama" and she answers.

In a flash of my mind, as if she's here.  She turns, she smiles, she's gone again.

But she's "my mama".