I’ve felt like a motherless child for a long time, even when my mother was alive. And even before my parents’ separation when, as a 7-year-old, I went to live with my father. 

My family had no name for Mom’s erratic behavior back in the 1960s. She was unlike the other mothers on our tree-lined suburban street in Hartford, Conn., who answered the front door in the mornings with pink curlers in their hair. Those mommies were warm and fuzzy, just like their bathrobes.

I wished my mother was like that.

Mom would enter and exit our front door abruptly, without explanation. One time, she took my bike with training wheels and rode it up and down the block. I was deeply embarrassed and stepped away from the screen door, hoping my friends wouldn’t see.

Was “crazy” the right word to describe her? I didn’t know how to put her behavior and my feelings into words, but I did learn to soldier on. 

My friends’ mothers always welcomed me into their homes when I came to play. Although they were kind, they never spoke about Mom, or asked how I or my older sisters were doing. It seemed as if my mother was taboo to them, too. 

My sisters and I rarely invited friends to our house because when you walked through our front door, you never knew what to expect from Mom, and my parents were not getting along. On the outside, I tried to appear normal, while my interior life spun out of control. 

There were moments when Mom’s love poured through. When she bathed and lifted me out of the water, drying me off with a soft towel and kissing my bare skin, it felt warm and cozy. I wanted to hold onto that mom forever. But, before I knew it, a vacant look would return to her brown eyes.  

Mom dressed haphazardly, sometimes frumpy, at other times outlandish. She didn’t seem to care how she looked, except for her face powder and the deep red lipstick that she’d smear liberally over her mouth. When I was a teenager, Mom chided me for being pale. “You need some lipstick, Esther!” I didn’t listen to her and wore only eye shadow and mascara. I shied away from lipstick, especially red. 

During my teen years, I could barely speak about Mom, even though I hadn’t lived with her in a while. But she continued to pop in and out of my life—sometimes for a planned visit, but at other times she just showed up.

Then, when I was around 19 and attending college in Manhattan, where Mom lived, she developed breast cancer. She had ignored a lump until it was too late. Her illness hit me hard. When I visited her in the hospital, Mom, who had lost a considerable amount of weight, looked small and vulnerable in those white sheets. When she saw how I was struggling to express myself, she found the words I couldn’t.  

“It’s O.K., Esther,” she said. “Our hearts are together now.”  

Mom needed to be medicated for her pain, a treatment that had a calming side effect. She grew less erratic and more present. Slowly, my guard came down. I let myself really see her, and what I discovered was a sweet and injured human being who had tried to do the best she could under difficult circumstances.

Mom lived during a time when it was harder to get an explanation for mental health conditions like hers, and when there were few good options for treatment. She never received a diagnosis, and my family remains uncertain of precisely what affected her.

Throughout her cancer battle, Mom and I spent a couple of years packing in mother-daughter experiences, which would soon be only memories. We took long walks, spent afternoons at the movies and went shopping. Mom always loved to shop. On one of those outings, a salesperson remarked, “Your mother is so sweet!” That shocked me. I couldn’t recall anyone ever saying something positive about her. 

Then one July morning when I was 22, I truly became motherless. I held her hand as the lines on her heart monitor went flat.

When I sat shiva, people told stories about a younger woman I had never known. How Mom had been smart and witty—a college graduate in an era when few women were. Oh, how I wished they had shared those nice stories when she was alive.

So many decades later, there is language that could have helped diagnose my mother’s mental health issues. In today’s world, presumably she could have taken medication and undergone therapy. Back then, there was mostly silence and stigma.

Now, people are discussing mental health challenges to push back against that stigma. Even though it’s not easy, I’m speaking and writing about my mother, about the brave woman she was, especially at the end. I’ll always wonder how our lives could have been different. It took a long time for me to open up, but here it is.

And these days, I’m enjoying wearing red lipstick, just like Mom. 

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Esther Kook is a teacher, reading specialist and freelance writer.