"We are not human beings, but human becomings," I can still hear my eight grade English teacher reciting. The emotion has lodged in my throat the past several days, and today came my catharsis, when I released something, some sort of bitterness I've clung to for so long that I didn't know where it ended and I began. It didn't consume me, but it was there, a very unchristian hoarding that I had convinced myself that I didn't have.

My Dad. He really is a great man. His eyes are the blue of glaciers, and they glisten with tears when you least expect it, sending to to the same wonderful fate. My adult relationship with this man has been strained to say the least. I don't mean to say that it has been poor, only that I was spoiled by how easy it was for me to know my mother and to love the stuffing out of her. My father and I didn't really know one another by the time I graduated high school.

I remember the proud father who often came to be the parent-helper at my preschool over the two years I was there, I remember the man who kept every gaudy key chain that I ever made for him during craft time, and I remember the beefy sandpaper paws of his that held my little-girl-hands so gently. Then, my brother started having severe behavioral problems, and my memories of him grow fewer and farther in between. Mom and I were often left to live with the chemical imbalance that was dropped into our laps, and I believe that this alliance was the root to our incredible closeness. Dad had his own business. He could find places to be when he didn't want to be home. Mom and I had to hold the fort.

I guess I've always kind of held it against him without meaning to do so—I am the biggest proponent of forgive and forget, yet I held on to this hurt. I constructed it into a shield that I used to keep myself from being truly close to my father. It is unfair to blame someone for their frailty. I have been wrong.

I went to visit with him one night this week. I've taken to doing this on a somewhat regular basis...which started because it made him feel good...and has continued because it sort of makes me feel good too. While there, Charlie called, and upon hearing that I was at the house, wished Dad to send his love to me. I said something to the effect of how prideful I am of my brother, how fiercely devoted I am to the person he has become...and how I never imagined such a day would come while self-locked in my bedroom while he beat against the barrier. No good could come from him getting through, I knew this to be true. These days, I leave the figurative door open, and give him a key just in case it should close without my notice. People change.

Coming out of my reverie, I heard a sniffle and turned sharply toward my father who sat kitty-corner from me in the living room. "I'm sorry, Laura," he said and I was caught off guard. "I'm sorry that I wasn't there." That was all he said. I was never certain that he understood my distance. I had never voiced my reasons, had never alluded to them...as already stated, I barely understood my distance.

The statement has been reverberating in my mind for days, and I've had the most wonderful sensation of warmth, reward...peace. It has a name: forgiveness.

We went to Dad's church this morning, Burke Lutheran held their special outdoor service at 10:00, and I promised I would go. The gospel was from Luke 13, about the woman who had suffered with disease eighteen years before Jesus picked her from a crowd and made her well. The sermon instructed us to be patient for our cure. The prayer at the end of the children's sermon summed it best, "Lord, help us wait. Help us trust you."

I brought the message back to Dad, who had been unable to hear the sermon (having volunteered his services to the cookout to take place immediately following). He has been struggling with his empty house. Today he was limping quite badly, having injured his ankle the night before. Had he gone to the doctor? No, there was no one at home to force him there while he convinced himself he could walk it off. Then I understood his emptiness, and I was humbled by how little I have let him into my life.

And my phone rings. Hours later, after Nick and I have returned from a last bit of shopping before our vacation which begins at the end of this week. "Hello?" It is him, letting me know that he has his ankle elevated and iced as he promised he would do as soon as his duties with the cookout were satisfied. I smiled, happy he called to tell me so. "Good. Thank you. You'll get in to see the doctor tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Hey, listen, I wanted to thank you for coming today. It meant a lot to me. I..." he hesitated and I heard his voice grow thick, "...also wanted to let you know that I am really impressed with where you are in life. I am really proud of who you are. I thought maybe you should know that."

I am smiling right now, too busy thinking of him to figure out how to wrap up this rambling mess of a post. I have my daddy back again, the one who patiently baited my hook AND took off the fish time after time, and gave us rides on his back while he crawled around on all four limbs...the one to whom I no longer feel like a disappointment.

Dear Lord, it was worth the wait.

Emotionally spent, I took a call from my father the next morning after what would have been Mom's 50^th. I was weary with crying, weary with longing, and weary with doing it all behind closed doors because this is now her second birthday that I've celebrated without her, and I wouldn't want to be accused of being overly dramatic. I am okay with her death most of the time (well, as "okay" as a person can be with choices that weren't theirs to make), but Mother's day and her birthday just hit me...the two days a year that I dedicated always to her.

"Hi, Dad."

"Hello, doing better today?" He had called the day before and knew I was having a tough time. He had told me that, just like last year, he was going to buy a birthday balloon and tie it to the iron planter at her grave.

"I think so," I replied. "Did you ever make it out to Mom's grave yesterday? I don't think you had been there yet when I stopped by." I had left work early to to buy flowers and place them there.

"I was there first thing in the morning! The balloon wasn't there!? I did stop, Laura, I did!" He had started to cry. I felt like crap for saying anything.

"Well...who knows...maybe Charlie stopped by and wanted it..." I tried to give a soothing explanation.

"No, Charlie didn't think he could go. Said it was too hard."

And then I stopped feeling like a loser for my 20 minute cry at her final resting place, which was really more of a whispered mantra of, "I miss you—oh, God, do I miss you..." because with my father crying in my ear and my brother momentarily dropping off of the face of the planet, it was obvious that I wasn't the only one that finds August the 14^th incredibly painful.

Dad later went back to the cemetery and found the balloon ribbon still tied, but the balloon gone. He called again to say, "Maybe your Mom just liked the balloon and snatched it up." I do rather like that idea.

You would have been fifty years old today. I would have loved to share this day with you. I become so angry when I hear women at work gripe about their age...don't they realize what an accomplishment it is to make it as far as they have? No, they don't. They didn't know you. They didn't lose you.

Gosh, Charlie and I look so young in that picture from your 48^th. I think he and I did years of aging during that last week of your life. We were so torn between wanting to hold you to us forever, yet knowing we had to tell you to let go. You'd be so proud of him, Mom. He's everything you always knew he was capable of becoming and nothing that everyone else thought he was. From his patient eyes to his gentle hands, he is you. I love him to pieces. I wish you could see. Perhaps you do.

I am sad that you're not here.

The Queen Anne's Lace is embroidering the edges of modernity, and I can't help but remember the daintiness you spread around me and the imagination you inspired. You named me after Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott's Beth, two of your favorite heroins of all time because they were quiet in their strength and deafening in their love—I always hoped that I would live up to such a tall name. I always hoped that I would make you proud.

I still do. You were a woman worthy of being impressed.

I love you.

It didn't seem to impress anybody else that I mentioned it to today, but a year ago I had surgery. It was the first surgery of my life, and I remember mostly wanting Mom, whose absence I still hadn't grown accustomed to. I don't even remember the pain all that keenly, only an outside awareness that it existed—this was mostly how I dealt with the pain as well, seeing as how "pain management" seems to be an oxymoron in my body's dictionary.

My family, so recently ravaged by my mother's death, were gathering in her hospital, the one with the Comprehensive Cancer Center, to cross fingers and pray that this was not happening all over again. I was so lucky, so lucky. Everything was raw—my emotions, my body, my spirit—but I was alive and I was going to be okay. My mother's surgeon fixed me in a way that she would have liked to have fixed Mom.

My mother's oncologist never had to meet with me.

They were gathered in an exam room across from mine in the general surgery clinic before I was admitted—I was there for a consultation with no idea I would find myself stuck in the hospital for a week. There must have been 10 them standing in that room across from mine, long white coats and low, detached voices...holding up films and seeming very mechanical. I saw him in that room, her oncologist, and it didn't occur to me until days later that it had been MY films they were all reviewing.

I know it's gone now, all of that...and I'm whole again. I know that it isn't a great practice to look back at bad times because it almost puts you right back in the place where it started and you're miserable all over again. But that is not the reason this event is earmarked in my history.

After Mom died, and even that last month when she was fading so quickly, I felt very alone. Falling asleep at night—what little I was sleeping in those days—would only be a chaser to hours of silent sobbing and feeling so utterly hollow. Who but your mother comes looking for you in the middle of the night when you don't answer their call? Who hurts when you hurt if not her?

I was so taken with what I had lost that I had forgotten what I had. Thank you to those of you who stood by my side even when I wasn't great company (or when I tried to break up with you, depending who you are) and for reminding me that I am loved.

I love you, too.