Lately I worry about my mom. I think she’s having a mid life crisis. And as a person certainly living with an undiagnosed mental illness, it’s bad. But I can’t reach her, she doesn’t want to be reached and I understand that.

Tonight I’m watching a movie and the mother dies. There have been many times in the last two years where all I wanted to do was run to my mother and cry, but instead I freeze. Don’t show love, because you recoil too often. But tonight during the movie, I called without a thought, and cried and told her how much I love her. Mama, you mean so much to me.

She is a strong and courageous woman who has endured years of trauma, neglect and abandonment. She knows more about forgiveness than I will ever be able to understand. She taught me to show up for others again and again, because it’s right to love people. Love all people. Broken people. Bad people. Misunderstood people.

She has an unstable sense of identity. But in her heart, she is kind. She is a child without comfort who gets up after the fall, wipes her tears, and searches for love again. She is an outspoken woman who speaks her mind and fixes everything herself. She is a complicated lover, because she’s never seen or known a healthy relationship. She is an amazing single mother, who died over and over again for her children. A mother figure to more needy children than I can count. She is the woman who’d open her home to anyone in need. She can be unreasonable and unreliable. She refuses to admit when she’s depressed. She sabotages her relationships, all of them. She yells and cries and breaks shit. She always answers my phone calls, and is my usual car ride home phone call. She is my best friend that I cannot hug because it hurts. She is the woman that I cannot show love because I cannot trust love, but also the person that I turn to when I need advice. She is the mother I would never change. The woman who didn’t graduate high school but knows more about life than most people. She is complicated and lovely. Unhealthy but beautiful. Coasting in life, but fucking living it in the most magical ways. My mother is real. My mother is broken. My mother is beautiful and she is strong.

I want to love her better, because she is not here forever. And she is worthy of all the love in the world.