I cried for my Mother. Finally.

Yesterday -- the day after Christmas.  The radio station I was listening to...  well, let's step back a bit:

My Mother was a church organist.  She had her Master's Degree in Music, so her interest, knowledge, and enthusiasm for good music went 'way back.  And of all the available Christmas music, she had two that affected her deeply.  

She despised "Oh Holy Night."  It was never clear to me exactly why this was.  I asked her about it almost every time she heard it and reacted.  Badly.  I think she felt is was too smarmy or something.  Overly dramatic.  But another part of it related to a job she had playing music at a local church.  There was this guy in the church choir who sang the song every Christmas during church service and he always (in her opinion) went 'way over the top in his performance -- and the congregation loved every note of it.  And they told my Mom so.  Ick.

So every time I hear that song, I smile -- remembering the response my Mother had.  (BTW, she always recovered quickly from her snit.  That's the kind of lady she was...)

The song she loved so dearly was "What Child is This?"  She knew the song as "Greensleeves."  It might have been something about the musical movement from the minor key into the major one.  Wouldn't surprise me if that was an important part of it.  How the music and the words reflected each other so fully.  

And so I would remember her again when I heard that song as well.  But it was always a smile that came from a deeper place than the "Oh Holy Night" smile. 

But when I heard the song yesterday and remembered my Mother, I started smiling as usual.  But all of a sudden it crashed down on me exactly how much I lost when my Mother died.  And I cried.  Hard.  

Now, I cry for relatives that have passed away.  A bit for my Dad and small oceans for my older brother.  But never for my Mother.  And I've always wondered why that was.  I have occasionally "blamed" her for favoring my older brother over me (blamed entirely internally, of course!).  But even if that were true (and of course I will never know for sure), it's easily understood for family reasons too complicated to go into here.  So the "real" reason for feeling so ambivalent about her, I think, escapes me to this very day.  But maybe as of yesterday, all that doesn't matter as much as it did. I cried.  And felt cleansed.

Some of this is likely mixed up with a quick piece of arithmetic I performed yesterday.  Our nuclear family was comprised of seven people: two parents and five kids.  And now we are three in number.  My next younger brother passed away several months ago -- taking us from "more than half" to "less than half."

I feel pretty good about crying about Mom.  She was in so many ways a delightful, wonderful person and everything (you would think) a child could want in a Mom.  I feel like I'm meeting her again for the first time.