I Want My Mommy

I’m in a beautiful countryside house, and the aroma of newly cooked Norwegian lefse is floating, ala an old Daffy Duck cartoon, all the way upstairs from the kitchen to the bedroom where I’m writing, right to my appreciative nostrils. It’s the same type of smell that filled my childhood home on the days my mom made fresh-baked bread from scratch and we’d eat it right out of the oven. The taste was delightful, but it was the smell — that luscious smell! — that made it A Day for Mom’s Bread.

Those days are gone forever.

My mother has Alzheimer’s disease, and while she is still with us on this earth physically, she is effectively gone as I once knew her. She seems happy and content at the nursing home where she now resides, but she is now a child — sitting in a wheelchair, doll in hand, smiling in relative bliss as the world continues on without the real, true her.

I want my mommy back. I’m 46 years old, but damn it: I want my mommy back. I want her to call me on the phone, out of the blue, like she used to. I want her to know that I’m her son, not her brother or the neighbor kid from 70-odd years ago who is still vivid in the deep recesses of her deteriorating mind. I want to get a handmade birthday card from her, both for the handwriting sample and for the sheer joy of knowing that she remembered I have a birthday. I’d like to talk to her like I’m her child, not like she is mine.

The house I’m in now — built just recently by my girlfriend Adriannne’s aunt and uncle — is filled with love and joy at the moment. It’s Lefse Weekend, a time when Adrianne’s family gathers to make lefse, hunt for deer, drink, laugh, and bond. The event is driven largely by all the moms, young and not so young, who are here. Several are mothers and grandmothers, and one is a great-grandmother as well. They are all still themselves — the people they have always been — and it’s hard for me not to be jealous. Because my mom — well, my mom is melting away, slowly but certainly. And there’s nothing I can do about it.

So I grieve. I grieve what I’ve already lost, what I’m losing at this moment, and what I will lose in the future where my mother is concerned.

But as I do that, I also accept — and crave — the loving embraces (literal and figurative) of all the mothers in this beautiful home right now. I imagine them being to me, and to my two young children, the mom I once had. I can feel their arms squeezing me tight. I can hear them telling me that everything will be all right. And I can allow the lefse smells that fill up this house to fill me up, instead of making me wistful about what — make that who — I’ve lost.

Especially since I haven’t really lost her, and never truly will. For while I may be fading from your memory, Mom, you’ll always be etched in mine.

Peter Vogt

I’m a writer. An essayist, to be more exact. I tell stories here—true stories, from my own life, in hopes they will make a positive difference in yours.

I share laughs and tears, insights and observations, frustrations and realizations, relying all the while on the storytelling wisdom of Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write.

It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused, and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates.