Poems About Missing Your Mother

My mother gave me her worry— that gene that runs through women in my family like a river that never learned to rest. She gave me her hands: small, capable, always reaching for something that needed fixing. She gave me her laugh— loud, the kind that fills a room and embarrasses teenagers and she never, not once, made it smaller for anyone. On Mother's Day we give cards with flowers and cursive that say: You're my everything. But everything is too small. Everything doesn't include the 3 AM feedings. The lunches cut into shapes you didn't ask for. The fights she started with the school, the doctor, the world— because motherhood is a fist made of love and she was always swinging. I am my mother's daughter. I know this because I worry like her, laugh like her, reach for things that need fixing like her— and someday, if I'm lucky, some small person will carry my worry forward and call it love.

Her number remains in my phone under Mom, as if the word could still connect us. I do not call. I also do not delete it. On difficult afternoons, my thumb pauses over the name and remembers the old sequence: ring, hello, what happened? Missing her is sometimes an unanswered contact card.

The recipe says a handful, which was precise in her hands and impossible in mine. I call my sister. She remembers the color, not the quantity. We cook by argument, smell, and one stained photograph. The soup is not the same. We eat it anyway, missing our mother through every unfinished instruction.