I lost my mom six years ago this week. Some of those anniversaries have been hard and some not as hard as I thought they would be. I never really know which kind I’m getting until it gets here, but I’ve been developing a sense over the last couple of weeks that this one was gonna be tougher than others.

This year the missing of my mom is getting complicated because it’s becoming intertwined with my own identity as a mom. Until now, I’ve separated my role as a daughter from my role as mother. But as each of my own kids handle the various challenges that life hands over to them, I’m beginning to think about the way I handled my own and the role my mom played in my life as I grew up. I am wondering if my mom felt then like I feel right now. I suddenly have this deep longing for my mom; I need her words, her wisdom, her perspective, to help me be the best person I can be for them.

These past six years I’ve focused largely on how her loss has impacted me. It’s human nature, I know, to be caught up in ourselves, to think about our own experiences and our own feelings and our own needs. I have thought about my mom’s absence in terms only of what it feels like to ME to be without her. But something has shifted in this sixth year. Now I’m thinking about what it felt like to BE my mom. What did she go through raising me?

My kids have all had their own challenges and for whatever reason, this summer has been a big one for them. Each is going through his/her own thing, and I’m trying to be the person that each one of them needs. Sometimes I’m successful and sometimes I’m not. Sometimes they look at me like they’re glad I’m here helping them, and sometimes they tell me to just leave them alone. I find myself thinking about everything I went through myself growing up – how often did my mom feel like I’m feeling right now? And how did she navigate that? I would give anything to be able to ask her.

There are a few constants in my memories of my mother. One is her fierce protective nature. She was notoriously suspicious of the world, cautioning and warning us of danger at every turn. She was also the fixer; when something went wrong and we needed help, she taught the master class in Getting It Done. Growing up, that protective nature became a little annoying; I would cook up some new adventure and I knew I was going to have to launch my best ad campaign to get past the warnings and the efforts to dissuade me from anything that might result in pain or problems for me. I wasn’t often successful, and I remember straining against that safety net often.

A small example: I remember vividly my sophomore year of high school when our boys basketball team was playing in the Section tournament in Mankato. A group of my friends were driving themselves up to the game. I BEGGED my mother to let me go along. I wanted desperately to be in a car with my friends, listening to loud music and being obnoxious fans for our team. The independence of it was thrilling – I hadn’t left town without my parents probably ever. I barely got the request out of my mouth before it was a big no – we were only just 16. None of us had been driving much, and my mother was not-even-kind-of going to consider letting me get in that car. I was SO MAD. She tried to soften it by having our family go up to the game ourselves and said I could go SIT with my friends if I wanted, but I was riding up with my family. I was so salty about that, that I wouldn’t do it. I sat next to my parents during the entire game and pouted, all angst-y and ridiculous. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t been given the freedom my friends had been given, and my sixteen year old self just could not see past the embarrassment to even consider the other side. Today, I realize a couple of things: until my request, my parents hadn’t even considered attending the game in person. They had no one on the team to specifically support. My dad always listened to games on the radio. Add to that the expense of driving up, eating out, buying tickets for four of us…? Going to the game was an actual sacrifice, made to accommodate ME – made to make ME happy. I didn’t even say thank you. I actually made the entire experience as miserable for them as possible by being a total brat. I also got zero enjoyment from the game, so I sure showed them, didn’t I? Yes, I know this is all part of growing up – it’s completely normal and not even a very exciting story. But when we all grow up and figure out these nuances, we get to say to our parents “hey, wow, that was crazy, and sorry I acted a damn fool for no reason.” I don’t get to say that to her because she isn’t here. And my question today is: did she know?

Did she know I would be sorry about it one day? Did she know that someday I would be 47 years old and would give anything to have her safety net descend when something hard looms in front of me? Did she know that the things she used to do or say that drove me crazy would all be coming out of my own mouth and directed at my own children where I, in turn, get to drive them crazy? I want her to sit across from me at the kitchen table and exchange a knowing smile, and commiserate as parents on equal footing. I want to call her when I don’t know what to say or when one of them brushes off my helping hand and tells me in any variety of ways that they don’t actually need my help.

In addition to being the Fiercest Protector, my mom was also the Solid-Gold Fixer. Any problem, laid at her feet, became her personal challenge. There wasn’t a thing she couldn’t do; she was a master at working a customer service line. She was the most tenacious negotiator, undeterred from her purpose until the mission was accomplished. I learned to be selective about the problems I brought to her. Paperwork and bureaucracies could be conquered easily. Interpersonal problems – not so much. Mom took very personally any wrong or personal affront I endured. She couldn’t stand to see me hurting, and I could sense that early, so I worked through a lot of my own childhood drama on my own, surrounding myself with close friends in the comfort of a social-media-less existence.

I’ve tried to pick up her model; I’ve become the do-er of the family, the one who handles the problems, whatever they are. I make the phone calls, I fill out the paperwork, I do the research, I make it happen. I, however, didn’t have to navigate the world in the way that my children have to navigate it today. I wasn’t faced at every turn with instant and immediate feedback, confrontation, or evidence of the drama that swirls around kids today. I recognize this is a new era, and with the constant presence of texts and Reels and TikToks and Snaps, the drama goes wherever they go and it’s next to impossible to escape it. How could they manage all of this without me? Figuring out who needs what and how and when is exhausting – and then the worst of things happens. You discover that sometimes you can’t fix it.

I want to call up my mom and say, what did you do, Mom, when you realized that you couldn’t fix it? It’s by far the worst and the hardest part of this parenting journey – watching when their world comes crashing down and I can only stand there, helpless to stop it from happening, unable to soften the fall. Mom, how did you bear it? How do you hold their hearts through it? How do you carry their pain with your own? I didn’t appreciate, then, that every time I was sad, every time I was scared, every time I was worried, my mom was probably all of those things too – maybe even exponentially so. Parents are supposed to protect their kids from the hurts, and our failures to do so are a real blow to weather. She probably hurt just as much I as hurt, and that never occurred to me.

When I lived in Scotland during college, I took a two-week trip backpacking around Europe. There are a hundred million stories from that trip, but the one I’ll relate here is the one where I got robbed in Salzburg, Austria. To make a long, long story very, very short, I was robbed and left only with what I was wearing and carrying under my clothes – my passport and a plane ticket from Frankfurt, Germany to London. That’s it. I had no money, no credit cards, no bus pass, no rail ticket. Somehow I had to figure out how to eat, find a safe place to sleep, and secure some method of transportation from Salzburg to Frankfurt and I had three days to do it. This was long before cell phones or electronic forms of money transfers, and this was a real challenge. I made a panicked phone call to my mother at 2am Minnesota time to lay this massive problem in her lap. I remember vividly knowing that there was nothing she could do about any of it – I just told her because that’s what I did – I told her everything, all the time. I cried my eyes out and felt sorry for myself then I hung up the payphone (yes, I had called my mother COLLECT from Austria) and then went to work at solving my problem.

This story really isn’t about me solving my problem. Obviously, I’m alive to write this 27 years later, so I figured it out. But here’s what I can’t shake: what kind of pain did I put my mother through in that phone call? How in the world did I call my Protector and Fixer and knowingly serve up a problem she couldn’t fix or save me from? How many years did I take off her life? I never thought about her feelings once; it never occurred to me – never once – that she was going to feel her own level of panic and helplessness. I probably took ten years off her life that day.

But would I do it differently? I don’t think I would. Certainly I feel sorry today that I put her through it, especially knowing now how much the parents feel when their kids are going through the tough stuff. But I’m not sorry that I called her. She had positioned herself as my person; the One To Call. There was so much comfort in knowing that I HAD someone to call; that someone would pick up that phone and be there, even if they couldn’t do anything to help. (Incidentally, the girl I was traveling with who was also robbed, didn’t have a person. She made no phone calls, she just waited, wide-eyed and terrified, for me to do something.) My mom was my person, and that’s what I’m hoping to become for my kids, if they’ll let me.

Today my mom would be 70. I wish I could tell her that I’m sorry that I didn’t think more about her feelings; I want to tell her that I understand it NOW. She should BE HERE so I can tell her that, dang it. I want to know if she knew it all along – did she know how much I loved her? Does she know that every day I see her more clearly? Does she know that I’m trying to be the best parts of her?

And really, I just want to know her secrets to bearing the pain that was not only her own. She held the hurts for all of us and soldiered on. She was the keeper of our hearts, and she held them so gently; I want to know how to do it so I can hold them for mine – the gorgeously tender and sensitive souls I’m blessed to be raising. I’m not made of the toughest materials like my mother was, so this is an art form I will keep working to learn.

Love you, Mom. Happy Birthday.