“Alexa, when is Mother’s Day?”

Finally, I just yelled it across the room.

Alexa really is suspiciously accommodating for 2021, isn’t she?

Anyway, there’s no logic in avoiding the date.

My personal protest.

Or pride parade?

Honestly, sometimes it does feel like who I am — who I have become.

Motherless (adj): without a mother.

She died in August of 2019. She’d been ill, went to bed and didn’t wake up. Such a simple series of events that somehow left my DNA is unfamiliar with its own spirals.

It is true that she is no longer here.

Not at the other end of my phone call.

Not in the handwriting on a birthday card complete with a “mad money” check — a hold over from college.

Not in the question about Nicky’s doctor’s appointment or prayer when his fever still hasn’t broken.

Not in the reminder of my sister’s birthday I never would have forgotten.

Not in the Pink Floyd sing-along on the way to the antique store.

Not in the overpriced bouquet of peonies and dusty miller sent because it is Mother’s Day.

But of course, I am not motherless.

She is stitched to my every cell.

The shiny inside lining of the vintage Whiting and Davis cigarette clutch once belonging to my grandmother.

The ginger jar, the brass candlesticks, the seashells on the mantle.

The window pane in the garage door, she spent the day teaching me how to fix

The way I tickle my kids when they pass too close or hug them intentionally a little too tight before bed.

Like the empty frames of the stollen masterpieces of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Garner museum — a reminder of beauty irrevocably lost.

We have only our memories.

Unless you also count imagination, of course.

I can always imagine her. I know her by heart.

I can imagine an email or her recorded voice thanking me for the guest towels or fancy soaps sent in the hopes of finally shaming her out of stealing them from hotels.

These moments are real, though they will never happen.

She once told me I was “easier” as a mother. Easier on her she meant, I thought on at the time. I’m easier on myself, too. Some women find parenting anxiety provoking, but for me it snapped in the last edge piece on the boarder of my puzzle — perspective and boundaries, curiosity and excitement over how it was all shaping up.

I was not surprised she felt me different.

But I was surprised at how much more sense she began to make to me.

The meals she made, the never ending paperwork, soccer sign-ups, dioramas and birthdays and all the car pools. MERCY the carpools.

I never understood until I did. “How did you…?” and “thank you,” was honestly all there was left to say.

And do you know?

I just really wasn’t done thanking her.

I am not motherless on mother’s day.

I am simply without an altar upon which to lay my heart.

With my memories and my imagination and my gratitude, I will build it.

And she will come.

Or perhaps that work is already done.