When you read a book or watch a movie, you meet the characters. You get to know them. You learn about their life. And when the movie ends, your relationship is over. It’s your job as the audience to continue their story. Like at the end of “The Breakfast Club” you see Judd Nelson as he does his famous fist pump while leaving, and you wonder “where is he going?” Where did he end up? We see the end of the "The Breakfast Club", but not the end of their stories. We wonder what happened to them. We make up their lives in our head. We decide what we want their lives to be. We make up their story. We remember what we want to remember about them. At the end of a Disney princess movie you're so happy for her and what she has had to overcome. You have to stay optimistic for how the rest of their lives go. You want them to keep being as happy as they were when the movie ended.
This is how I felt about my mother. When I was two years old my mother passed away. I grew up pretty much without a mother figure in my life. Everything I know about her has been told to me by other people. I have to rely on family and friends of her to get some kind of grasp on who she was as a person. She is just this mystery person who I was always told was my mother and I know she is, but she was just like a princess that I saw in movies or read in my books.
It’s a weird feeling to have a person that is half of you, half your DNA, half your spirit, half of who you are, but not know them. And when someone says, “oh my goodness! You are so much like your mother,” you take that as a compliment, but you’re not sure what that means. You put together bits a pieces of the person that she could be. You have an idea of her attitude and values and what she was like.
But like The Breakfast Club and princess movies, I had to continue her story myself. I wrote it myself. I now have the memories that I consider to be true. I put this character of my mother that I created into new situations. She grew up with me. She was there through all of it, Birthdays, prom, graduations. The Princess that I made to be my mother was there through it all. She was there helping me through it. She was there to see everything. She was with me though the good and bad. Whether in spirit, or just as the princess that I made her to be. It didn’t matter. She was there. She was everything that she could be.
