Easter: The day I miss my lost daughter most

My garden today

Holidays were always bittersweet without my daughter. Easter is a huge holiday in the Polish Catholic tradition, so big, in fact, that when I was a little girl I remember trying to decide whether I preferred Christmas or Easter as an occasion. Even without the presents from Santa, Easter was equal to Christmas because it brought other gifts: coloring eggs with both my parents on Thursday or Friday the previous week; making bread with my mother early Saturday morning, before anyone else was up; then moving onto the pastry, stuffed with walnuts and spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg, the heavenly aroma filling the house by noon; preparing a basket of special foods for breakfast on Sunday and taking it to church to be blessed in the mid afternoon on Saturday; making nests from corn flakes and chocolate to be filled with jelly beans.

Sunday meant searching for a hidden basket of goodies somewhere in the house, my father making sure it was never easy to find; followed by Mass in our new Easter outfits with a pink carnation pinned to my shoulder, followed by a breakfast of those blessed foods, and then, finally big extended family dinner with my aunts and uncles and cousins with ham and Polish sausage and borscht and the hard-boiled eggs topped with beets and horseradish ending with my mother's delicious prune layer cake with buttercream frosting. And, of course, lots of chocolate.

Then suddenly, in my early twenties, I was the mother without the daughter to pass on these traditions. I gave

The post-Easter reminiscence: Everybody's Got Something

Before we began

I meant to write a post for Easter but I was so busy with cooking for 12 on Friday and Saturday, time got away. And then Sunday was taken up with the more-or-less annual Easter lunch. Here I am today, Monday afternoon.

Holidays can be depressing for anyone whose family is far-flung--whether or not there is a relinquished child in the past--and it certainly has been that way for me. It took some years but eventually I learned that as a transplant from the Midwest I needed to recreate the kinds of holiday events that I grew up with. As for Easter? In the Polish household is is not a holiday to be sneezed at!

My earliest memories surrounding the day include getting up shortly after six on Holy Saturday and coming downstairs to find my mother making bread--something she only did on this day. As soon as I was able she let me knead the dough. Push down with the heel of your hands, fold it over and do it again.

A First/Birth Mother remembers the first Easter after surrender, only days earlier

Four generations in 1996

Easter approaches in a few days, we celebrate the resurrection and spring with the symbol of birth: eggs, eggs, eggs galore. At my house nearly twenty friends will drink mimosas and lunch on beet salad and asparagus and eggy dishes and Polish sausage that's only made at Easter time and my mother's prune cake with buttercream frosting, and I will not really have time to relive in my mind that first Easter after I relinquished my daughter. That day I called my parents in Michigan to wish them Happy Easter--or did they call?  I can't remember. I do recall the day was long and I was empty and my daughter's father was with his other family.

I wanted to die.