Dear Mom, Remember These Top Five Moments of Easter’s Past

Dear Mom,

I wanted to write today to tell you that I missed you. I was going to write this post as a top five list of Easter moments but deep down I knew that I would doing to camouflage my feelings about missing you at Easter. I would get to remember some of your finer Easter moments without directly coming out and addressing how I really feel. Next week, it will be six months since you passed away. I miss you more now than I did when you died. I have found April to be especially tough for some reason. It doesn’t make any sense. I got through Thanksgiving and Christmas mostly unscathed and I weathered winter pretty well. I love warm weather and it has gotten nice around here so I don’t really understand why this month has been so hard.

Maybe it is because it would be normal not too see each other as much throughout the winter but now that it is spring I can’t really deny the fact that you are gone any longer. Maybe it is because Mother’s Day will be here in less then an month and it is getting to be the season of Mother-Daughter activities and whatnot. Maybe it is because I keep remembering how you came to visit me around this week last year when Baby Nugget was a new baby. Maybe it is because I keep running into acquaintances on my Hike It Baby outings who are out with their own mothers after the birth of their new babies. In any case, I feel like I keep being reminded that you are not here.

I keep being afraid that my family will fall apart because you are gone. Several years ago I read the Cheryl Strayed book Wild and one of the things that she mentions is that she and her siblings stopped communicating after her mother died. I don’t actually think that will happen to my family. I still communicate with my sisters and father regularly but I can understand how grief complicates the impulse to call those who also knew the one you lost. Sometimes you think that you will feel all the feels if you call up the ones you love.

Anyway, Mr. Katie suggested that I write to you on my blog. When I first started writing this, all I could do was cry and while I am sure this post will still make some people cry. I thought it would be fun to remember some of your or life’s finer moments from Easter’s past.

Mom, Remember These Top Five Moments of Easter’s Past

1.>Mom, when we were kids I remember the time when I was 8 or so when on Easter morning you made me and my sisters all come into your bedroom and hang out with Dad while you went downstairs to make sure you knew the hiding spaces of all of our Easter baskets. You were gone for what seemed like a long time. I thought maybe you had to go outside and look for the Easter baskets in the yard. I wondered how a bunny, like the kind that were in our yard could drag a basket in the grass. It was only after I was older that I realized you probably were putting our Easter Baskets together while we were upstairs in your bedroom. Also the baskets were hidden in the living room and weren’t that hard to find, but I didn’t care, I had candy. I learned from you that sometimes moms have to scramble. PS: I think I stopped believing in the Easter Bunny that day, but don’t worry I still believed in Santa for a little while longer.

2.> Mom, I remember the Easter you got my an X-File VHS tape of the television show in my Easter Basket. I was about 16 years old at the time and it was the first time I had seen a commercial copy of the television show put on a tape. Before that time, TV shows weren’t available for purchase in stores. It was the perfect present for me as I was obsessed with the X-Files. Also I remember that day that you had to go to work after we looked for our Easter Baskets and had breakfast or an early lunch. It was like you did all the work then you had to go to work, you didn’t get to sit a round and relax. Thank you for your hard work Mom.

3.>Mom, I remember all of the Easter Egg Hunts. Every year when I was a kid you took us to our church’s Easter Egg hunt which was really just for the kids who went to our church. I liked it because they hid the eggs for the older kids in hard to find spots like under dead leaves leftover from the fall and under rocks. The hiding spots weren’t easy. These hunts gave me an unrealistic view of Easter Egg hunts because the suburban Easter Egg hunts in the area I live in now are usually very well attended and everyone finds all of the eggs in just a few minutes. It is a real mad scramble and it isn’t what I remember from growing up.

4.>I remember the Easter Egg hunts you made for us girls in our yard. Depending on the number of snow days that were unused during the winter at our school, we had somewhere between 1-4 days off of school for Easter. It could be hard to entertain us for that period of time so I remember the Easter Egg hunts we would have in our yard before Easter. I think sometimes we did them more than one afternoon in a row. I know that there was candy in the eggs the first time they were hidden but after a while we just kept re-hiding the eggs with nothing in them and that was fun too. I also remember another time one of my sister’s and I hid the hardboiled eggs that we just dyed in the neighbors trees that bordered our driveway. You didn’t like that because the eggs were in the neighbors yard and they probably would have gotten smelly if we didn’t find them.

5.>Mom, I remember the Easter Vigil Service where the youngest of us girls, O, was baptized. She was only two weeks old and you were very excited to have her baptized at the weeks. Now that I am a mother, I think you were very brave for bringing a two week old to a Easter Vigil mass. I really do love the Easter Vigil Mass because it pulls out all the stops, there are candles, lots of singing, holy water that is sprinkled on the parishioners with an aspergillium, and tons of incense. It is also a really long service. It was a very special night and I am glad that you made the choice to have her baptized that night. It was also special because all of us girls and my dad where there. My older sister and I were away at college during that time but we were home that weekend for Easter Break.

Mom, I remember so many other things about how you made Easter Special. You always made scalloped potatoes and I never knew that scalloped potatoes didn’t have cheese in them until I was an adult. I also like the way you always make hardboiled eggs for us to dye. Since my sisters and I are spread out quite a bit in age, I feel like I was still dyeing eggs into my 20’s. I also like that you didn’t care if all the eggs we dyed ended up being brown after we over dyed them.

I always liked the way that we never had to be fancy on the holidays. We always got dressed up for church but as soon as we came home, we took off our church clothes and put on shorts or jeans. I remember many Easters playing outside when the weather was nice. Even now something feels a little off if Easter is too fancy. Twice now in my life I have been to a nice brunch at a restaurant on Easter and both times I had a good time but it away felt a little off as if something were not quite right. I like a comfortable relaxed Easter. Thank you for cultivating that sense of comfort.

Anyway, Mom I miss you. Writing this letter made me feel like you were listening to what I was saying. We will see each other again. I will try to take what you taught me and give those things to my boys. I know doing that is the most meaningful thing I could do with what you gave me.

Love,

Katie