Which way hurts more, when you lose her? I know which one I’d rather have. Even if it does hurt more in specific ways, I would rather have had a chance to know her and be shaped by her. I don’t even know what I’m missing, having lost her so young. But it’s a grass-is-always-greener thing.

Several of my friends have had babies recently, within the past couple of months. One of my closest friends had a baby in France, where she lives now. The baby came five or six weeks early, which she’s made light of but which sounds like kind of a big deal to me. They had to stay in the hospital for the first few weeks till he could feed properly, though he wasn’t in an incubator or anything like that. I spoke to my friend on the phone one day.

I love her no matter what her mood or state of mind; as I said, she’s one of my closest friends, and I don’t say that lightly. But talking to her that day was like talking to the Platonic ideal of her. She was herself, utterly and completely, magnified by a thousand. The highs were higher, the lows lower. One minute we were talking about the babies on the preemie ward, and the anxious parents, and we talked about how sad it was there. We got very sad. Then the next minute she was telling me about how the grandparents were planning a visit, and how this, the first grandson, may as well have been the Sun King himself returned to earth, and we laughed and laughed. She laughed so much, in a way I’d rarely heard her just let go and be merry. It was marvelous. Motherhood is agreeing with her, and it’s a good thing to see.

Another close friend of mine came to stay recently, and we talked about her experience with the births of her two children. I wasn’t around when they were born; this is a friend from college and we’d temporarily lost touch. She told me that, as soon as they brought her the baby, both times, she fell totally and completely in love as soon as she saw them.

I know this doesn’t always happen. There’s post-partum depression, and lots of other factors, and there must be times when the hormones just don’t kick in and the poor woman is left with this helpless yet extremely demanding person they cannot get away from. I can’t imagine how awful that must be.

This motherhood thing is fraught. I get that it changes your life; it should change your life. I believe there’s nothing more important than being responsible for the care of another human being, particularly an infant or a child. But I also agree with people who say that this mother’s day thing kind of reinforces a bullshit idea, that a woman who is a mother is better than a woman who is not. These friends of mine who are mothers are pretty awesome. But they were before, and they still would be if they’d chosen a different path.

Women are having fewer babies these days, I’ve been learning. I know more women who have chosen not to have children than women who’ve had them, though of course since I’ve chosen not to have kids myself, that’s not unusual. I think this is a good thing. Women are having fewer babies because fewer of them die in infancy or childhood, and fewer of them are needed for hard labor to support the family. Children should be wanted and loved by people who can care for them. But there’s lots of work for all of us, good work, and raising a child is not necessarily the only or the best thing an individual can contribute.

A person is not more or better when they have a child. Except to the child.

Hang in there, folks.

I am four years old. My mother and my aunt are in the kitchen, talking grownup talk. I am playing with my younger cousin, John, who is still in diapers. He is throwing a ball down the basement stairs, and I am running down and fetching it, like a dog, over and over.

It’s fun. I’m out of breath. Our basement is scary, but safe because the stairs lead off of the kitchen, where my mother and my aunt are talking, and I can hear their voices. I’m thumping all the way down, thumping all the way back up. The carpet on the stairs is thin, like felt, over the wooden steps. We all had bruises on our shins, all the time we lived in that house, from those stairs.

And they’re slippery. My cousin laughs and throws the ball. I run after it, and halfway down I slip and fall, and bump my head.

I start to cry. I leave the ball and run upstairs, sobbing. My cousin on the landing, wide-eyed. I go straight to my mother with utter faith that she will make it right.

And she does. She turns from her conversation, all her attention on me. She kisses my forehead, clucks in sympathy at the goose egg growing there, consoles me. She gets an ice cube from the freezer and wraps it in a paper towel, to press against it. She holds me until I stop crying.

She died less than seven months later.

Fast forward thirty years. My brother is dead, too, suddenly, tragically, his son the same age my brother was when our mother died. I am in Michigan for the funeral and all that goes along with it. My father is stoic, as ever. My sister and I are in his basement, going through things. He’s pulling stuff out of boxes, old report cards, stuff we left behind, especially me, because I’m almost never there.

And out of one box, he pulls a small packet of letters. Letters our mother wrote to him the summer he was in Japan, for work. The summer before she died. The summer I fell down the stairs. We had no idea these letters existed. What a treasure. My sister and I sit down immediately and read.

There are only four of them. And in one, my mother describes how I fell down the stairs, the goose egg, how she got me an ice cube.

It’s as though she reached out of the past, and kissed me on the forehead.

I didn’t need validation for this memory, but here it is.

I’m sure she wasn’t perfect, since no one is. The letters reveal a woman who is afraid to drive on the highway (born and raised in the city), who hates being alone at night, who teases her husband to buy her gifts and wonders if the geishas are making her look bad. She can’t work the lawn mower. She worries about money. She makes sure to tell my father what we kids are doing, and that we talk about him all the time. She obviously loves her husband and her children very much. And in one letter, she mentions that she’s losing weight and “feeling rotten.” She ascribes it to her nerves, her crazy diet, and missing her “sweetie,” but I’m sure it was the first sign of the leukemia that killed her.

No one ever took her place; no one even tried. If she’d lived, maybe when I got older we would have fought. Maybe she would have told me to wear less makeup, or more, or to put some decent clothes on, or pressured me about my relationships, or told me I was gaining too much weight. I hear all kinds of things about problems between mothers and daughters, but I don’t know anything about that. My mother was still my whole world when she died.

It’s the only time she ever let me down.