The beautiful bright autumn leaves are falling all around
me. I look up from the pile of leaves I
am trying to corral and watch as the wind challenges my efforts by picking up
the leaves from the top of the heap, and scattering them back over the fading green
grass. I feel warmth in the area between
my thumb and pointer finger. When I look
down at my hand I notice the skin there turning pink from the friction between
my hand and the wooden rake handle. It
is finally fall and I am very excited.
This is my mother’s favorite time of year. I look down the yard a ways and see her
raking leaves into a pile of ash and flames in our front ditch. She looks up and our eyes meet. Her face lights up in a smile that goes all
the way to her eyes. She yells for me to
come to her. I walk toward her and take
her in. She is barely 5 foot tall, and
as of right now her frame is full including breast that were entirely too big
for such a short woman. Most of my life
my mom has been on a diet. Her weight
fluctuates and she can never quite get it under control and keep it where she
feels happy with herself. Her thin brown
hair whips in the wind. Her face is free
of make-up, as it is most days, and her round cheeks are slightly chapped due
to the cold autumn wind. She is wearing
mismatched jogging pants and an oversized print t-shirt. “The wind is making this hard, huh?” she asks
as she leans against her rake slightly out of breath. “Yea”, I respond, “but I don’t mind. I love the leaves and it feels so good out
here today.” She nods in agreement. “You want to go inside and make some hot
chocolate?” I bought some at the grocery
store the other day.” I nod my head excitedly. There is nothing this little chubby girl
wants more than hot chocolate.
We get our hot chocolate made and sit side by side
with our legs dangling off the side of our front porch. We live at the corner and entrance of our
neighborhood. It is actually a very nice
area, but we live in the little trailer built onto. The further you drive into the neighborhood
the nicer the houses get. Car after car go by and person after person waves,
some even honk at us and smile. Everyone knows my mom whether they want to or
not. She has the gift of gab. She loves
to talk to people, all people. I
remember at her funeral visitation people from all walks of life, bikers to
business men, coming to pay their respects. I, on the other hand, am extremely
shy and hate going anywhere with her because I know I will be forced to talk to
people while she points out how shy I am.
Looking back on memories of my mom this was a great day as we sat
peacefully drinking our hot chocolate, talking about carving a pumpkin for
Halloween, and how many lights we were going to put out for Christmas this
year. The only thing my mother loved
more than fall was Christmas.
“Who left their damn shoes in the floor?” I jump as
I hear her scream. “I am so sick of
living in this nasty ass house! No one
cares that the house is filthy. It’s
like you all love living in filth! I can’t have anything nice because all you
do is destroy it!” I look up from the
book I am reading on the couch and lock eyes with her as she approaches
me. She sees the fear in my eyes. I look closely at her trying to find a hint
of the person who sat side by side with me and drank hot chocolate earlier. She
is not there. I start to apologize, but
she cuts me off. “You’re not very damn
sorry or you would get off your lazy ass and pick up the house. Don’t you think?” I try to respond and squeak out a “Yes…” but
she cuts me off again. “I don’t want to
hear your lies Jodie! Not again. “She mimics a voice that is supposed to be me…
“I’m sorry mom. I’ll do better”, then
she turns back to her anger laced tone, “Yea right! All you’re gonna do is sit
there and take up space while I break my back to keep this house cleaned. Go to
your room and get out of my sight. You
make me sick!” I stand up and walk past
her. I brace myself for the hard smack
that is to come. I’m not sure where she
will hit me, the back of my head, my behind, or my legs. All are possibilities so I just brace for
it. I walk past her and I feel the sting
of her hand across the back of my head.
The jolt causes me to bite down on my tongue. I feel the tears stinging my eyes, but I hold
it together as I swiftly head to my safe destination out of sight. I reach down to grab the shoes which
triggered her anger and she grabs my arm.
I freeze. “Don’t pick them up
now! For God sake…no! You like being filthy.
You love living in disgust.
You’re too good to pick up anything, so by all means leave them there
for me to get!” I look up at her and see her tiny bottom teeth; a prominent
feature when she is enraged. She moves her other arm and I flinch. She sees me flinch and I see her eyes
immediately change. Some of the rage
leaves her and a flicker of what seems like regret flashes across her
face. She looks down where she is
squeezing my arm and loosens her grip.
She looks back up at my eyes, blinks, and says in a more unsure tone,
“Go to your room.” The organic fury that
was there is gone and her current anger seems more an attempt to hold her
ground and finish what she started despite the fact that she seems to have
realized she overreacted. This
realization didn’t always come when it needed to. Many times punishments for tiny infringements
were grave, and that uncertainty was the hardest part of living with my
mom. Looking back on incidents like this make me
wonder how much she was really able to control when it came to her temper. At times it seemed like even she disapproved
of the way she responded to things that upset her, but she still couldn’t or
wouldn’t overcome it.
I quickly and quietly shut the door behind me and sit
silently on my bed. I hold my tears in
for now in case she decides to come into my room. She doesn’t like to see the
negative consequences of her actions, and showing that she hurt me, more
emotionally than physically will cause her to spin out of control into an angry
fit again. No, I will wait until tonight
when everyone is sleeping and cry then.
I start to nervously clean my room until everything is in the exact
right spot. I sit on my made bed and
start to read again. Later that evening
my door opens and she appears in the doorway.
“Hey there. You still reading
that book?” she says in a playfully exasperated tone. I shake my head and smile to show her there
are no hard feelings. My mom doesn’t
like to apologize… with words that is.
She continues, “You read more than any child I know! I made your
favorite for supper. Tacos and Cheese
dip! Come on and we will eat. Maybe after supper we can go get some ice
cream since it is just you and me. It’ll
be a special treat for just us.” I jump
up and head into the kitchen. We make
our plates in silence and head to the living room to watch Designing Women and
the Golden Girls as we eat our tacos. We
laugh at the characters and the witty plots talking about how much Ma reminds
us of Grandma Jettie and Rose reminds us of Mamaw Tucker. The earlier infringement is silently forgiven
but never forgotten, as I learn how to navigate the choppy emotional waters of
my mother’s existence.
Peace and solitude would come in stents of hours to
months. We would be coasting along and
the tranquility would plunge into unsafe and unsure places within mere moments.
The valleys would consist of a simple emotional abuse to physical attacks that
left their visible marks on my body. Through it all some of the greatest abuse
endured was that of simple neglect. The
absence of intervention to protect me from horrible and prolonged sexual abuse even
after she knew it was happening. It shocks
many people to know that after my mother learned of the abuse, I was still
subjected to years of interaction with the abusers. No action was taken against any of them
legally or even socially. They were
still a part of my everyday life. My
mother’s response to me regarding the abuse was, “It happens to all little
girls”. Looking back on my childhood now
I realize the situation was all greatly complicated by drug and alcohol abuse;
amongst other things. I sometimes describe my childhood as the “Perfect
Storm”. I don’t think that one big thing
caused the entire hurt and emotional trauma. It was really a thousand small
things that all added up to what was more than any child should have had to
endure.
As a grown woman who has decided to make peace with
my childhood it has become apparent to me that I must look back and find the
good that was in my mother, remember it, and cherish it. So today…in celebration of Mother’s day, as a
gift to my mom, myself and most importantly my daughter I want to give my
mother complete and total forgiveness. I
want to remember some of the wonderful things about her and I want to mourn the
loss of my mother and the woman she was starting to become as she aged and
matured. I have come to the conclusion
that maybe some people take more time to get where they need to be in life. I choose to believe my Mom was one of those
people. Do I wish she would have gotten there
and been settled before I was born? Do I
wish she would have protected and made me feel loved? Do I wish that my
childhood and relationship with my mom would have been a healthy one? Sure.
But, I know this for sure: holding onto anger over what wasn’t…will not
make it so now. At this point I have no
other option than to embrace the good that was inside her, even if the good
should have been more than just intentions, and celebrate it on this day.
I walked into the front door of my Mom and Dad’s
house and I see my mom sitting on the couch.
She is completely bald, her skin is dull and yellowed from the damage
the cancer and the chemotherapy has wrought on her body over the past decade.
Her brown eyes are sunken in and the hollows beneath her eyes are a dark
brown. I immediately notice the new
black fanny-pack beside her and the clear IV tubing running from it to her
medi-port. She looks a little hazy, but
she smiles and motions for me to sit beside her. I walk over in my nursing uniform, sit beside
her, assess her port, and ask what the new medication is. I am in my critical care rotation of nursing
school, so I deal with her health and treatment in the one way I feel best at,
as a nurse. She loved the fact that I
was in nursing school. “We have almost
made it!” my mom would say every time I completed another level of nursing
school physically and emotionally drained.
“I always wanted to be a nurse,” she would say to me, “but, it will be
close enough having you to become one. I
am so proud of you. You are so smart and
I always knew you would be something wonderful.” Many times she would go onto
to tell me of things that she wished she had done differently. During these conversations I saw the woman
who she was, the woman she knew she had been, and the woman she wished she
could go back and be if given the chance.
We talked more and got closer the last year of her life than I ever imagined
possible. I silently wished that I would
have had this woman as my mother growing up instead of the person I feared and
doubted truly loved me when I was a little girl. I would sit and wonder when it all went
wrong. But, I know now that being exposed to her regret during the seemingly
endless talks we would have as I sat beside her bed doing my homework at night would give me priceless insight and
clear direction into the woman and mother I wanted to be. I knew as she talked that I didn’t want to
get to the end of my life and have so many feelings of regret. Sometimes I
wanted to ask her where it all went wrong.
There had to have been a time when she was happy and content with being
a mother. Did the stress of life lead
her to this place of distance and neglect from my young childhood until now? I should have not been so scared to ask her
more questions, but 19 years of fearing her would not allow me to.
Over the many years my mom had battled breast cancer
she had received many in home therapies. So the presence of a new drug in the
black fanny pack did not frighten me. I
was curious to know what cool new medication she was taking and how it would
help her defeat the cancer that threatened to take her at such a young
age. I would always request the nurses
send home medication inserts or drug education leaflets, so I could research
the drug and completely understand how it would work and what to expect. I was her caregiver when she was too weak to
care for herself, and I guess understanding the treatments and caring for her
port were small ways I could control some of what was going on in regards to
the cancer and the fear of losing her.
I make my way to the seat beside her on the couch. She takes a deep breath and I see tears well
up in her dull tired eyes. She reaches
over and picks up my hand. She turns it palm up and pats our palms
together. This is something we used to
do when I was a little girl as we walked together at the grocery store and such.
“Dr. Hutchinson said the cancer is
pretty much all over now. She really
thinks that the chemo is not doing anything but making me sick…” she pauses
while holding my stare to gauge my reaction. I pause and try to take in what
she is saying. I momentarily feel like I
am stuck in time and I can’t really hear anything or feel anything. Ten years of remission and reoccurrence. Ten years of surgeries, ports, and
therapies. Ten years of fear but always
triumph. There has always been another treatment
option. There has always been the “next
step” when it came to the cancer. Dr.
Hutchinson walked on water as far as I was concerned. She always managed to make it work. To find a way… But here she sat with a
morphine drip to ease the pain and a hospice consult to help assist with her
end of life care.
Sitting beside her, staring into space, frozen with
fear I suddenly recall the day my mom found the knot in her right breast. It was a hot summer day and we had been
working in my grandmother’s garden. My
mom and I came inside to get a glass of ice water. We lay down side by side in my grandma’s
floor on each side of the air vent. My
mother’s large breast fell slightly over each side of her chest as she
stretched out on the floor beside me.
She reached up to scratch the side of her right breast as a trickle of
sweat ran down it under her t-shirt. She
froze and her hand stayed on that spot.
I noticed the immediate look of concern on her face. I asked her what was wrong and she said,
‘Feel right here. Do you feel
that?” I put my little fingers on her
breast and felt the tiny hard spot beneath her soft skin. I remember clearly how foreign it felt there.
As I moved my fingers it rolled beneath them but didn’t move with the
flexibility of the other breast tissue. I don’t clearly recall what all
happened after that, but I knew my mom had cancer, whatever that was, and she
had to have surgery. The surgery was
followed by radiation. The doctors felt
confident that such small spots and negative lymph nodes would result in full
remission. Little did they know the
cancer was still in her body and would return with a vengeance on her liver.
The chemotherapy she received was “experimental” and
she had to stay at UAMS for months at a time due to the neutropenic state it
caused. One night as we pulled out of
the UAMS parking lot I missed her so much that I couldn’t stop crying. This broke my dad’s heart, so we didn’t go
home. He took me to the Mall on
University to buy her favorite perfume, Eternity. I was almost so excited that I forgot to put
the yellow mask on before barging back in her room. As soon as she looked up and saw us coming
back in she started crying. After she
opened her gift he had dad take us outside in the hallway, and the light above
her door came on. A minute later a nurse
walked in her room and after a only a few minutes walked back out. I waited patiently thinking they were
completing some treatment I didn’t need to be a part of. A few moments later the nurse rounded the
corner from the nurses’ desk with a huge smile on her face and a mask that was
different than the ones we got off the table outside my mom’s room. This one was not as flimsy. She told my dad we could come back in. We followed behind her as she nodded yes and
handed my mom the mask. Mom motioned for
me to sit beside her and she said, “Do you want to have a sleep over with
me?” I started smiling and shook my head
yes with excitement. There was nothing
more I wanted to do than stay with her.
My dad was gone a lot with construction work, so the people who I felt
most comfortable with were Grandma Jettie and Mom. When mom was not home and I was not able to
go to grandma’s I just felt lost and sad.
She handed me the special mask that would stay in place better while I
slept, and that night my mom wore a mask too.
I fell asleep beside her and later she woke me up and I moved to the cot
beside her bed. Although no one may
understand how I could still love and want to be close to a woman who was not
what you would call a wonderful mother…she was my mother and I did love
her. I loved her very much. She was my moma.
Forgiveness.
One simple word yet so extremely complex. I think it is human nature to seek
balance. Our bodies are built to
maintain something called homeostasis. It can be explained very scientifically,
but basically it is what drives you to reach for a blanket when you are
cold. Eat an apple when you are hungry.
Become "puffy" when you eat too much salt. We are innately made to seek balance in our
physical bodies, and so we are emotionally as well. It's just easier to mask
and even ignore that need emotionally.
In my life anger has always been born of hurt. All the times I look back on my life when I
was really mad at someone it is because my heart had been broken, and it was
more comfortable for me to "defend" myself through anger than to be
vulnerable to the pain they had caused me.
The fury over my horrible childhood burned, and like all others this
emotion needed balancing. The only way
to balance my anger was to punish everyone who had a part in my abuse, especially
my mom. After all she should have
stopped it. She should have protected me.
She should have done more. I
wanted these wrongs to be righted! It was the only way. It made me feel better to know that I hated
each of them. I was standing up for the
little helpless girl that couldn’t stand up for herself all those years. If they suffered it balanced my suffering,
right? The score would surely be even.
For years I have worked through the five stages of
grief, for the loss of my childhood and innocence, as my soul strained to find
emotional balance. There were many years
during the denial phase when I thought, Oh
it wasn’t all that bad. It could have
been worse. I would watch Oprah and
here of an unthinkable abuse case and say, Well
see you didn’t have it that bad! The
anger phase definitely peeked after I gave birth to my daughter. I compared my motherly love and desire to
protect this beautiful little girl to my mothers, and I couldn't comprehend how
she could live with herself. I couldn't
understand why someone, anyone, didn't see what was going on and step in to
stop it...to save me from this nightmare.
The bargaining phase seemed to span from the time I was old enough to
comprehend what all had happened to this very day. I constantly ask, "what if..." I
couldn't possibly name all the “what if's” I have asked over the years if I
tried. Everything from "what if I
had never been born" to "what if I had done something to stop all of
it (like calling 911)". Depression was another one of the phases that
occurred simultaneously throughout the years, but capsized into an emotional
storm raging during my post-partum period.
There was no more denying how bad it all really was. There was no more "understanding"
of the situation. As Hannah grew I felt more saddened for the little girl who didn’t
know what it was to be loved and be safe in her own home. There was no undoing what had been done in
the past. I felt desperate to fix
something that could not be mended. I
was broken and there was no way to fix me. This just made me sad to my
core. It made me feel helpless to the
circumstances there was no way to change. Then there is the final step which is
acceptance.
For me acceptance is much like forgiveness. They go hand in hand. In order to forgive I had to fully accept
that the past is simply what it is…a frozen place in time written in permanent
ink. There is no way to go back and
change anything there. There is no tool
to erase or repair it. But, it’s okay
that it is not fixable because it is behind me, and I don’t exist there
anymore. What matters is the present, where
I live today, and the future where the pages are blank waiting to be filled
with love and joy as my marriage matures and my love for God and my family
grows stronger each year. I know in order to give Hannah and James the mother
and wife they deserve today I must choose to accept the difficult and sad
chapters in my life. I must choose to pardon the mistakes and wrongdoings of
those that, in anyway, contributed to the pain. This allows me freedom from
staying behind in that sad scary place in order to keep punishing the people I had
grown to hate so severely. The funny
thing is those people are not even in that place with me as I continue to punish
them, so really I am the only one still here.
I am the only one still suffering if I choose to stay behind and not give
forgiveness. It is that simple really.
So, Mother’s Day to me will no longer be a holiday
mixed with joy and anger toward my mother.
I refuse to allow it anymore.
From today forward I will celebrate this day as a mother to my beautiful
miracle…my daughter. I will also
celebrate it as the daughter of a woman who is no longer here. A woman who I
still have so many questions for, but miss very much. A woman who I fully believe knew all of her
faults and failures before she left this Earth.
A woman, who despite being really awful at motherhood, was able to give
me some pretty precious gifs along the way through witnessing vices as well as
her virtues.
My mother loved to help other people. I remember year after year going around town
and giving less fortunate kids Christmas gifts she had collected while volunteering
at Neighbor to Neighbor. My mother loved
family and friends. She had a gift that
allowed her to talk to and have close relationships with people of all walks of
life. She hated to see any injustice
over differences in race or beliefs. She
taught me that all people were God’s children and we should learn to find the
good in others and love them despite their flaws. My mother didn’t take any crap off of
anyone. She was nick named the “Mouth of
the South” partly because she would talk to a wall if it would talk back and
partly because of her blatant, sometimes offensive, honesty. My mom was all about 2nd, 3rd,
and even 4th chances. I think
she related to people who just couldn’t get it together and that allowed her to
offer forgiveness more easily. The list of
vices and virtues goes on and on, as it would for most of us should someone evaluate
our lives today, but I know one thing for sure…Being a witness to my mother’s
short life gave me a dynamic view of an imperfect complex woman. I learned what
I could be and what I definitely did not want to be in my life. I learned how to fail, but I also learned how
to succeed.
So, it is time to close this chapter of grief and
sadness. It is time to put away my anger
and embrace forgiveness and love…
Ecclesiastes 3:1-22
To
every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A
time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up
that which is planted;
A
time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A
time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast
away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a
time to refrain from embracing;
A
time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A
time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A
time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
Happy Mother’s Day Moma…
