By Stacey Patton

The photo shown above, in some ways, belies the reality of my relationship with my mother. The truth is, she and I have never been captured in the same frame and images of us from that era are rare. For years, I’ve carried a tattered photograph of her in my wallet, pulling it out from time to time to finger its edges, gaze into her eyes, and plant a gentle kiss on her forehead before sliding it back into its place among credit cards, receipts and business cards.

My mother has never seen photos from my girlhood or the woman I’ve become. But with the help of modern technology that didn’t exist in the 70s, 80s or early 90s, the two of us are shown together for the first time in this composite. After a little manipulation, cropping, restoration and editing by our Art Director, this photo powerfully captures the illusion of what never was. It also brings forth feelings of sadness, but also a strange sense of redemption for a mother I lost at the beginning of my childhood.

On August 31, 1982, Robin Harris scribbled a note to her sisters and grandmother on a yellow legal pad. “This should come as no surprise to you,” she wrote. She had been in pain for a long time. Years earlier, her parents were murdered. And since, she had endured all kinds of familial dysfunction – an alcoholic grandmother, slights and insults that came with growing up as a dark-skinned girl in a color-struck bourgeois Montclair community. By age 21 (the age she was in the above photograph), she was the single mother of four children and suffering with severe bouts of mental illness.

“Look at me,” the next line of her letter begins. “I don’t even have my shape anymore.”

Before signing her full name, Robin told her sisters and grandmother to “rejoice” because “I don’t hurt anymore.” In big loose cursive letters, she wrote, “Good Bye.”

Still dressed in a white nightgown and matching slippers, she stepped up onto a small wooden side table and tied a sheet around an exposed steam pipe in the living room and took her life.

It’s a terribly painful and unfair thing to grow up without your mother. And it’s even more disheartening when your mother gives you for adoption and takes her own life. A whole childhood is spent tortured by questions, voids, anger and this overwhelming sense of being cheated. But most of all, a child abandoned by her mother can spend a lifetime struggling to learn how to trust, love, or define what it means to be mothered.

Last Mother’s Day I took a trip to the cemetery where my mother is buried. When I arrived, the grounds were dotted with visitors. I had to stop at the main office and pick up a map to get directions on how to find Robin’s plot. The receptionist told me to count a certain number of trees and look for  strangers’ names on two adjacent headstones near my mother’s unmarked grave.

It was strange, looking down at grass as I held a basket of flowers. I was disappointed because I couldn’t stoop down and brush leaves or blades of grass off a tombstone with her name and perhaps the words Loving Mother etched on the surface. I even found myself pacing in a rectangle, wondering whether I was standing above her head or feet.

“I’m gonna get you a marker, Robin,” I mumbled a gentle promise, as I placed the basket in the middle of the grassy rectangle. “And I want you to know that I’m not angry with you. I understand everything now,” I smiled at the ground, stroked the top of a few blades of grass and then walked away.

What I was able to understand was her history. It took years for me to step into the context of Robin’s pain, losses and challenges to forgive her. As my anger at her dissipated over time, I was able to see that all along she had been reaching from beyond the grave to continue to mother through various women in my life.

There’s my Irish-Catholic mother named Maureen who lives in Asbury Park. She never forgets my birthday and always sends boxes of brownies, chocolates and other treats during the holidays. There’s Edna in Trenton, a tall, sturdy black woman quick to keep me in line. There’s Pamela in Manhattan, a journalist and professor, who has invested so much time in my development as a writer, thinker and as a human being. There’s my Italian mama Ginny in the West Village, who I spend late night hours with on the phone talking about life.

There are others, an entire village of 50′s something black and white women that I thank Robin for placing in my life in her absence. So this Mother’s Day I pay tribute to all these special women in my life. And of course, I pay homage to Robin Harris, who redeems herself through the loving smiles, hugs, stern and warm words of wisdom spoken by all my mamas.

Stacey Patton is Senior Editor/Writer for TheDefendersOnline and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. She is also the author of That Mean Old Yesterday – A Memoir.