When the world stopped during that pandemic, mine had already been stopped since I was seventeen, when my mom left us. The paralysis wasn’t some passing moment—it was the start of a whole new, painful way of existing. The world around me eventually picked up its rhythm again, but my internal clock froze the second she said goodbye, leaving me in this numb state that tainted everything that came after.
Holidays lost all meaning. Mother’s Day, Christmas, my birthday… they turned into quiet days, marked by a longing that squeezes your chest in a way only someone who’s lost their mom can understand.
I was talking to a friend who also doesn’t have her mom anymore, and she wrote me something that hit hard:
“Being a mom makes me understand on a deeper level that our lap is a sacred place to protect and teach how to love.”
I read it and smiled with tears in my eyes, because my mom’s lap was exactly that: sacred. Safe. The place where I could show up wrecked, with nothing left in me, and walk away whole again—like she’d stitched my soul back together with her own hands.
Even after a brutal day at work, she’d sit with me. She wanted to know everything: how the test at school went, if ballet class was leaving me sore, what I’d done, who I’d talked to, and what I was really feeling underneath it all.
I loved lying in that lap. Even when I was already sixteen or seventeen and thought I was “too big” for that kind of thing, I still went looking for it. She’d run her hand through my hair, slow, like she was calming a kid and holding a woman at the same time.
Some days the missing is so physical it feels like my whole body is searching for that contact, like it got etched into my skin. I close my eyes and try to bring back the weight of her hand on my head, the slow rhythm of her fingers; for a few seconds, it feels like she’s still here, protecting me in a way no one else can.
Sometimes, facing hard decisions, I feel completely alone and wonder: “What would she say to me right now? Would she approve of who I am today?” I never told her that I prostitute myself. She only knew about my hypersexuality, my taste for multiple partners, and she worried a lot about it. She always told me to take care of myself, protect myself, and use a condom in every single encounter. I could see the fear in her eyes, but I never saw judgment. Never. She never tried to change me or make me feel dirty. She just looked at me with love and worry, saying softly, “I just want you to be happy, my daughter.”
That’s what hurts the most and comforts me at the same time: knowing that even without knowing all my secrets, she already accepted me whole. Her lap was big enough to hold even the parts of me I was ashamed to show.
Sometimes the longing is so physical it feels like my whole body hurts, like there’s an open hole where her lap used to be. I cry with my eyes closed, smelling the perfume she wore and imagining the weight of her hand on my head. For a few seconds, it feels like she never left.
I wish I could lie there just one more time, cry what I didn’t cry back then, and ask her to hold me while I fall apart. But then I remember that lap didn’t end. It just changed places. It lives inside me now, because a mother’s lap doesn’t disappear. It stays in a way only someone who’s felt it can explain.