Mom
Every time I cry, the word “mom” rises out of me. It slips out before I know what I’m asking for, as if my body understands something my mind hasn’t caught up to yet. Even so, I’m not sure which mom I’m calling for.
I know the word has a real person attached to it. It’s maternal comfort I’m reaching for — the kind I haven’t touched in a long time, the steady presence my body still remembers after years of learning how to go without. But the “mom” I reach for when I’m breaking down feels larger and blurrier than that.
She isn’t standing in a specific room or tied to a single memory. She feels more like an idea: someone my body trusts before my mind does, someone whose arms feel like a pause. Perhaps, someone my younger self remembers as home.
Home used to be a place. It had walls, routines, a certain way the air felt at night. But now, when I try to picture it, everything fractures. I don’t know where home is anymore. Is home where I grew up? Where I am now? Is it a person? A version of myself that doesn’t exist anymore?
Home has felt just out of reach, even when I was standing inside it.
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Maybe home is the place where I felt safest being small. That’s what the word “mom” seems to carry with it: permission to be small. Permission to fall apart without needing to explain why. When I call out for her, I’m not asking for solutions or lectures. I’m asking for someone else to take the weight for a moment, because I don’t know how to keep holding it on my own.
I think about the Matryoshka dolls I used to own as a child. They were originally carved to represent motherhood. Each figure opens to reveal a smaller one nested inward, depicting a life carried forward through containment. When I long for “mom,” it feels like wanting to be that small. Wanting to stop being the outer shell for once. Wanting to be the part that gets carried instead of the part that carries.
But mom is resting deep in the ground, gone for over a decade now.
Mom is working out of town, a voice that checks in somehow.
Mom is cooking dinner in the kitchen, hands moving through what she knows how.
Mom is everywhere, and yet, nowhere.
There is grief in not knowing where to put that longing. It’s strange to miss something without being able to name exactly what you’ve lost. Sometimes I wonder if I’m mourning a version of home that never fully existed, or if I’m grieving how safe things felt simply because I didn’t understand how fragile they were yet.
Perhaps the “mom” I call for is the care I’m still learning how to give myself.
Until then, I remain the largest doll, hollowed and holding everything altogether. Until then, the “mom” I call for goes unanswered.
Note:
This piece is a republication of a previously deleted essay. Due to a missing original URL, system restoration was not possible.
