Missing our mothers in different forms
Rajeev Ranjan Jha 
Missing Mummy
Missing Mummy
We all were missing our mothers when we arrived in the session - though each of us were missing her in a different way. It was Mother’s Day and the words ‘missing mummy’ were two very loaded words that brought up a lot of feelings for each of us.
Before we opened the book, we made space for what we were arriving with. Grief in its many forms: the grief of losing our mother to death, the grief of our mothers still living but somehow not present. The love we experienced for our mom in complicated forms - mixed with anger, with the wish that things had been otherwise. The grief of missing the mothers our mothers could have been had the world been kinder to them. We realised that missing mummy pointed in several directions.
Grief masked as anger
The book Missing Mummy by Rebecca Cobb had opened up so much for each of us even before opening the book.
One of the first images we stayed with was a child holding a piece of clothing that had belonged to his mother. From a distance, the image looked like two people holding each other. Only when you looked closely did you see it was a child alone. That movement from the appearance of closeness to the reality of solitude was chilling in some ways.
The objects that our mum use(d) carry a memory our mind alone cannot hold - the smell, the texture, the specific way these objects were touched. When she is no more, you can reach for these objects but you cannot reach her.
Grief shrouded in confusion
The book made space for the grief of not knowing where someone is gone when they are gone. The child in the story does not fully understand the absence of her mom - he keeps returning to her things, keeps waiting in the hope that she will come back. For some of us, this not-knowing was so familiar. Not for the lack of understanding, but the reality of losing someone whose presence is so interwoven into the fabric of our everyday life that its removal cannot be reasoned through.
An art by a participant about what they remember their Mummy with
For many, our mothers have been the person who have held everything together, who knew where everything is, who everyone turns to, doing the work of many people without acknowledgement or rest. The love for our mothers arrives mixed with sorrow for all she absorbed, that was never hers to carry alone.
Grief is all the love you want to give but cannot
Missing our mothers was so many things for us - it was missing someone gone, someone still here, someone always just out of reach. It was missing the woman she was before she became our mother. And sometimes quietly, it is the grief of a relationship still being figured out, even now.
Sitting with mom shaped hole in our hearts
This reading was facilitated by Supriya Gupta.
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