I was a Girl Scout when I was a young girl. I remember coming home from elementary school and telling my mom I wanted to join my friends on Monday nights in the basement of the Lutheran Church in town, learning campfire songs I still know to this day and earning badges. I am pretty sure that’s when my obsessive, Type A, goal-oriented personality began to take shape and be fed. With cookies, of course.
I wonder now if it was because she lived in the city until she was 26 and many of the things going on fifty miles away “in the country” (translation: suburbs) were so foreign to her that she looked at me as if I had asked to join the KKK. But I wore her down and she walked me to and from the meetings every week as she never learned to drive. Writing this now
I realize I don’t recall if she walked home while I was promising, on my honor, and then came back to get me or if she waited somewhere nearby. This is one of a hundred things a week I wish I could talk to her about. Despite our extreme closeness when she was alive, there always seems to be something to tell her or ask her.
Other than school groups and sports teams, the Girl Scouts is the only club I was ever a part of . . . until 2012 when my mom died. In June of that year I became a member of a very special sorority made up of daughters whose mothers have died. It is an exclusive group, allowing for no exceptions to its sole criteria for inclusion. Pledging is the most intense, difficult and heartbreaking initiation ever required for entrance into any clique and we have absolutely no idea we are on the cusp of lifetime membership. And at the moment the woman who gave us life takes her last breath, we are immediately inducted.
There is no ceremony, no card to carry in our wallet, no secret handshake or annual convention. But there is an unspoken difference between those of us with and those of us without our moms. No matter what else has happened in your life, until you’ve gone through your own “Hell Week” you cannot understand how her death will inexplicably feel like your own.
When I hear of another woman losing her mom, my heart hurts for her and a little bit for me too all over again. For in this sorority we are all connected, sisters mourning the women who made us all daughters.
