I was thinking about my mother tonight (this morning). I was thinking about her because I can't go to sleep because I'm thinking about some crazy projects I came up with that I'm thinking about really trying this year and I thought: she'd help me out on these crazy projects. She'd sit in public and look (possibly) stupid with me. She'd love these ideas. And love me for having them.

She always loved me. I was filled with love tonight for my projects and wanted her to be here to hear me tell her about them and to help me make them real and to share my joy in their reality. I wanted her to be a part of me becoming whole, doing something I love, taking a risk and being crazy and having it work out. What I miss most about her is the unconditional support she always gave. I thought about her the other night, about how in my first year of college I pretty much cut all ties with home and only went home when school was shut down. She was taking classes at my college and she would leave letters for me at the school post office from "One Lonely Mother/4 Quilt Lane" saying she missed me and wanted to have lunch with me. I ignored them and had a good time at school.

Then that summer she died; a week after we had come back from a vacation to Ireland. I didn't know it was coming. I don't think I really acknowledged her condition at all, except in a conversation I had with my brother earlier that year in the spring, when my father called to say she was in the hospital and we might have to come home. I called my older brother and said "Is he saying what I think he's saying?" and he said "Yeah, I think he is." But she came out of the hospital and nothing more was said about it and I spent the summer working and living on campus and brought two of my co-workers/classmates home for my birthday and we went to Ireland as a family and then we came home and she died.

I often feel like my life unraveled from that point on; that I no longer had a center or understood what to do. I don't know who I really ever talked to in my life - maybe I didn't even talk to her - but this made me more isolated. I never felt like my father understood me (or cared to). I didn't really talk to my siblings. I didn't have any really close friends. And now my mother was dead. The one person I could always turn to, without fail, who knew and shared my sense of humor, who read the same mystery books I did, who was smart about math and words and liked logic puzzles and was in A.A. and had all these interesting and odd friends from there and always sent me to educational type stuff and wanted me to be in gifted programs and classes.

I never stopped be 19 years old. I'm still there; still that kid who was just out of his freshman year in college and working there for the summer cutting grass; who never had a girlfriend or any understanding of girls; who didn't understand his place in the world and looked to others to tell him what to do because no one worked with him on his own mind and how to find it and work it.

In some ways, it's good: the world is still open like a book; I feel like I have forever to do anything and everything. I feel like I could learn to skateboard tomorrow and I'm convinced I could do some serious tricks on a snow halfpipe if I got in shape.

On the downside, I'm not very mature or organized and don't understand how relationships work and how to see others and not just myself. I don't really trust anyone and I trust everyone more than myself, feeling guilty for making judgements even if I know in my gut they're right.

I wish my mother had lived to help me sort through myself and find something there. I don't know when I would have finally come across that resource or used it wisely (my younger brother had the revelation about our father when he was 28 or 30) but it would have been helpful to have someone like myself to talk to, to guide me.