Forgiveness: There is a Time for Everything

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 2^nd, 3^rd, and even 4^th 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…