I.

When she died, I didn’t miss her, which did not seem right or fair or even biologically possible. All it seemed was true.

 I remember the feeling of weightlessness after the funeral, once I was home—in my home, the one that took decades to build by scratch and sweat. That night, as I crawled into bed, fresh from the shower and bathed with the light of my bedside lamp, I sunk into soft sheets, pulled the covers up under my chin, and rolled onto my side. It took me a minute or so to get comfortable. When I finally did, the breath I took was the deepest one I remember, and it filled me with helium. Suddenly weightless, I did not have to fear a thing. She was off the earth, and I was not afraid of her wreckage. Not any more.

That night, peace wrapped its arms around me. I slept.

II.

Cards poured in, featuring the elaborately scrolled letters and ornate florals pulled forth by the gravity of death. 

I remember one handwritten note in particular. Your mother must’ve been a wonderful woman to have raised a daughter like you. I was surprised by how hard the words slapped and the sentiment stung. As though fourteen words stole from me forty-one years of trials and aches and loss and fear and decisions and degrees and tears and friends and men and sex and therapy and longing and contemplation and resolution and knowing and strength.

 My blood and mortar threatened to crumble. But I forgave the sender. She meant well. (People usually mean well). She didn’t know. No one knew. How long had I wanted to believe it, too?

III.

On earth, we have instructions. Honor thy mother; Love her to your most innate, invisible depths. That’s what God told us. Life doesn’t come with a manual, it comes with a mother. That’s what embroidered pillows tell us. My mother is my best friend. That’s what social media posts show us. Your mother is here to protect you. That’s what my desire told me. There are too many instructions, and the words they use make no sense. IKEA manuals: the mother is supposed to work this way.

 She did. Until she didn’t. She was there, until she wasn’t. She’d be back, until she fled. She’d be real, until she hid. She loved, until she raged. She soothed, until she scalded. Odd how my confessional now, so many years later, reeks of betrayal. How it burns like sin to write these words.

You are not your mother. That is what my therapist tells me.

IV.

Today, I don’t need to write these words. I’m not angry, bitter, or sad. The planes in which I exist are warm and safe. Instead of scrawling my sentiments, I should be writing a hundred cards—shipping them around the world to the hundred women who raised me. Strong women with clear hearts pumping blood full of oxygen and certainty. Women flawed and steady and true. Those who take my hand. Those who turn on lights when the tunnel is too dark. I want to send a hundred roses, rich red the color of faith, to the hundred women who have given me myself. I long to embrace my friends with a hundred arms and gift them the strength of a thousand oaks. These tall, strong, faithful women, whose canopies both shield me and let in dapples of light, deserve to be celebrated from on high.

They have taught me what it means to raise my daughters.

-Tracy Rothschild Lynch

Tracy Rothschild Lynch is a lifelong Virginian, with an MA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. When not writing, she reads loads, plays tennis, watches movies that suck her in, and explores the lush parks and vast arts scene of London where she currently lives with her husband Mike and a handsome one-eyed Shih Tzu named Fergus. Her two kick-ass daughters attend university in the U.S. Tracy has been writing nonfiction and poetry for thirty years. A few of Tracy’s writing achievements are as follows: “First Shower” and “Chemo, Round One” (poetry), Fall/Winter 2018 Medical Literary Messenger; “Take a Swing” (essay), Life in 10 Minutes; “Second Chances,” (poem) in the second anthology of The Cancer Poetry Project, 2013—read aloud at the World Cancer Day event in London, 2013; “Inappropriate,” in the Fall 2011 Brain,Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers. This essay received a Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention, 2013. It was also listed as one of Brain,Child’s Top 15 Essays in 15 Years, 2015. Tracy has also written for various corporate and university websites and school publications. She is a writing instructor. In addition to teaching online writing courses, she has worked with more than two hundred teens in the past eight years. She has recently completed a memoir and is working on her first screenplay, which explores the quirks of southern small towns and the power of strong women.