Category Archives: Mom

Please Remind Me.

November 17, 1948. That’s the day my mother was born.

November is the worst month. It’s getting darker daily. Colder, too. Everything is dying.

My mother is already dead. It’s said we all start dying the minute we’re born but she really took that to heart.

Come April, when spring is upon us and my mother’s deathday looms, I won’t be this sad. Her death was an end to her suffering, and an easing of my own struggles around that. The light of spring is hope and losing her finally on that day in April doesn’t feel as sad as this reminder of her birth. Then, my memories of my mother won’t be clouded by sadness and pain.

But I am sad in November. The lost hope of what could have been and the towering mound of if-only wishes are all too much in November. Everything else that happens, both in my little world and in the larger world around me, amplifies my own grief. It’s like a pair of mirrors, each shines off the other creating endless reflections of sadness until I can’t fight it off any longer.

The darkness of November continues to creep in and it wears me down until I’m nothing. I feel damaged beyond repair, ruined by who my mother was and what she made me. Her death was supposed to be the end of me feeling this way. I have been cheated.

November is knowing that nothing, absolutely nothing in this world, can take any of the hope I once had and make it real. As unlikely as any sort of healing was while she was alive, I could still hope. I could still pretend. November reminds me of my naivety and foolishness. November reminds me that it’s all set it stone now.

She would have been 67 today. Would have been.

When you see me and I seem tired, or I have a look on my face or a heaviness on my soul, it’s just November. If you could, remind me that the seasons change and spring will be here eventually.

This is yeah write’s nomo Day 17.

Featured image credit.

Ebb and Flow.

There are words and phrases that, when I hear them, they are like sneaker waves, knocking me temporarily out of whatever moment I’m in and transporting me back in time. Thankfully, Foley catheters, baclofen and Hoyer lifts don’t often come up in casual conversation.

I was watching a comedy special with Tig Notaro the other night which seemed like the perfect antidote to my melancholy mood. A comedy special should be safe, I thought. But it wasn’t. Someone approached Tig to share something along the lines of, “When you had cancer, that’s when I was diagnosed, too.” And there it was, hiding in my “safe” comedy special, the phrase that I just cannot hear without stomach clenching.

I was diagnosed.

After my mother got sick, she said that all the time. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I was diagnosed with MS. When I was diagnosed…

Night after night, phone call after phone call, she told people she was sick. She said it like she was announcing what was for dinner or what she’d watched on TV the night before.

I was diagnosed.

There are so many other ways to say what she obviously needed to say and yet she chose that one phrase every single time, saying it so casually that I wanted to scream at her, “Stop fucking telling everyone you know that you’re sick! Stop saying it like you scraped your knee.”

When you’re fourteen, the more you hear something, the more true it is.

For the next 20 years she said it to anyone and everyone, her voice only growing calmer, more relaxed as the disease stole her strength. As her illness progressed, it wasn’t like a minor injury anymore. She said it with the appropriate level of devastation, but by then the damage was done physically, mentally, emotionally, that her inflection wasn’t necessary to feel the weight of it.

Now I can’t hear it without a sea of ordinarily repressed memories flooding back to me. I was diagnosed can collapse my insides faster than anyone knows but I’ve had lots of practice pretending my skin is enough to hold me up; I can react like a normal person most of the time.

It’s five years today since she’s been gone and longer than that since I’ve heard her voice. I’ve almost forgotten what she sounded like but when I hear those words, no matter who is saying them, they sound like my mother. I don’t want to forget her but I don’t want to remember those parts anymore.

I don’t know if using the words will ever take away their power. As I type them now I feel like my organs are being scooped out; I’m systematically hollowed. I wonder if next time it won’t be so hard. I wonder if remembering will ever get easier.

I wonder if I’ll ever stop being tricked into thinking the ebb of grief won’t be followed by the flow of its return.

Into the Woods.

Needles crunched below while you remained silent

As I brought you into the woods, the pine

trees scented the air and then I heard you breathe deep.

 

When you finally start, your bitterness runs so deep,

I let you carry on. I keep silent

Standing before you in the shade of this majestic pine.

 

I am slain among the pine;

Your sharp words cutting deep.

You speak your piece and fall silent.

 

I am silent when I leave you with the pine; this time your wound is deep.

 

 

November and December

I sit here in anticipation of the days that bring me down.

My mother’s birthday is less than a week away. She would have turned 66 this year. This will be the fifth birthday she’s missed since she died.

The anniversary of my grandfather’s death is about a week later. He’s been gone eight years. I never need to count the years – I simply look to my son who missed sharing this earth with his great-grandfather by about six weeks.

December hosts both my grandmother’s birthday and her deathday. The last time I saw her she had just turned 75. Twelve days later she was dead. That was sixteen years ago. I’ve almost accepted that the last time I saw her we argued. I still think she was being unreasonable and I’m sure, if we could ask her, she would still think I was being disrespectful. Maybe not though. Maybe time enough for both of us to calm down would have changed the conversation. But I’ll never know and I’ll always remain a disappointment for doing what I knew in my heart at the time was the thing I had to do. Grandma was forgiving and loving. I never held her scorn for long. I like to hope that would have been true in this instance and so many things would have been different.

My grandfather and I shared many traits and our stubbornness and resultant ability to hold a grudge were two of them. We could anger one another so easily and in a time when I was walking away from anything that was hurting my heart and soul, I walked away from him. I won’t say that turning my back on him was wrong, but I will tell you my inability to turn back around, to try to work it out, to try to forgive him for hurting me will always be one of my greatest regrets. I wonder, though, if his not coming back for me was one of his. We talked some before he died but it wasn’t the same. I’ve heard it said it’s never too late to make things right with people if you can just communicate and the truth is that is not true. Sometimes it is too late. I opened up my heart again too late.

These were my mother’s parents. When she couldn’t sustain her children on her own, these are the people my mother turned to for help. My grandparents kept us fed and housed and safe and warm when my mother couldn’t do it. Yet, when my mother’s toxicity reached levels I could no longer withstand, what I lost was not my mother, but my grandparents. In my efforts to untangle the mess that my relationship with my mother had become, there were casualties I had not intended. If I’m being honest, I understand it. They were simply protecting their daughter as they always had and perhaps, as parents often are, unable to see that I was not the enemy.

I’m painfully deep into writing about all of them. They have not been far from my mind much at all lately and the anticipation of the days reserved for their memory haunt me with such force this year I’m crushed by it. The distance of time allowed for the clarity to write the story but it has done nothing to heal the wounds. Not this time of year anyway. Not in November and December.

Adapting the Talk.

I recently took a trip which was to be exactly what I know I needed: time to recharge, time to think about, talk about and be inspired by writing and creativity, and time to work on projects that are important to me. I thought I returned home motivated and ready to take on the world.

But returning home, in reality, meant jumping back into a world where creativity and personal projects get put on the back burner. Things like a sink full of dishes, a hamper full of laundry and a day job that pays the bills all get in the way of doing what I actually love to do. Returning home meant being faced with new challenges and new drains on my time. How I feel about the challenges is irrelevant. Sometimes you just have to do the things you don’t want to do.

When I was a kid, just like any other, I didn’t want to do anything that didn’t immediately please me. “Tough shit,” my mother would say. “If you’d have just done it instead of complaining about it, you’d have been done by now.” Homework, a chore, grocery shopping or errands, it didn’t matter, this was my mother’s response.

When her health declined so much so that her responsibilities became unmanageable for her and therefore became mine, her tough-shit-just-do-it attitude didn’t wane. She just mixed up the words. 

“Sometimes shit happens, ‘Chelle.”

So I do my chores. I’d be lying if I said I did them with little complaint but they get done. I do them first so that they will be done, the implication of my mother’s words of wisdom having lead me to believe that once the chores are out of the way the fun times can begin. That may have been true at one point, but it certainly isn’t true now.

By the time the chores are done for the morning it’s time for work and then when work is done it’s time for chores in the evening and when those chores are done it’s time for sleeping. But sleeping is just for me and for no one else and it’s not a job someone pays me to do so it’s supposed to count as leisure time, right? And when I get done with sleeping: chores.

And I know that this is the same for every working mother. There are often more obligations than there are hours in the day. I know for some it’s easier and for many more it’s harder but I don’t think it actually helps any of us to know this since knowing we all have to do the dishes and fold the laundry doesn’t actually get the dishes done or the laundry folded.

What I want to know is how they all manage their dreams? We obviously can’t have it all as we may have been told, or at least not all at once. Do I need to just wait and my time will come or is that just another lie I tell myself so I keep getting up to do the dishes?

My mother’s dreams died while she sat on her couch. If I could tell her now that I have dreams, would she adapt her tough shit talk once again?