Mom

Great and Mighty Pleas

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She’s trying to hold it together in the off chance there’s still a sliver of hope she can convince me. Oh, how she barely balances steady while she awaits her fate.

“But Mom, I didn’t exactly do my homework because I edited as I was writing the other night.”
“I understand. But you didn’t talk to me about that when I told you twice to get it done, and as I’m looking at it now, there is work we must finish.”

She starts to waver, feeling her case falling.

“I erased an “s” on one of the words and I changed a letter to capital,” she says.
“I think you barely looked it over because you wanted to watch T.V. And that’s the point, isn’t it? That you didn’t really do it.”
“But Mom.” Her voice cracks as it dips and heaves like waves. She crosses her arms and plops down angry. I try not to laugh.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You don’t get T.V. today. We’ll fix your story together tonight before you write the final draft.”
She pouts silent and in a flash I’m back to my third grade year. Arguing with my mom about why I should stay up late, the valid reasons other kids got to linger after the college basketball games. They were perfectly good reasons, I tell you. And they would have worked for me too, if she would have just listened.
The begging, the pleading, the drumming up of any excuse that sounds legitimate. The trying to sound mature and the severe incompetence to do so, what with the sobs and hysteria when I didn’t get my way.
I had a friend that would sneak to her phone and call me. She’d whisper into the receiver, “I’m grounded. What do I say?” I’d look over my shoulder for the enemy (my mother) and whisper back. “Sound super sincere, and tell her you’re sorry and that you’ll really try to do better.” She’d call back twenty minutes later. No whisper. “I’m still grounded.”

These flashbacks happen in odd ways now that I’m a mother. I connect dots I never would without having my own children, because I see the other side. Was my mom thinking what I’m thinking now? You see, dear one, I know this scene. I’ve been where you’ve been. And I know what you don’t. How much more it will benefit you if I teach this lesson instead of acquiescing and teaching you another. I promise with all my heart, I get how this sucks. (no, she would never think the word “sucks”) I recognize the game. Though you might think you aren’t winning, you are with what this is cultivating: character.

There was great weeping and gnashing of teeth as her siblings started cartoons. More desperate pleas were tried without success. She made her brown-sugared toast. I poured some coffee.

“I want you to sit in the front room.”
“But I’m not watching.”
You know that look where you aren’t even weighing the options, you just mean what you said? I did that. It was awesome. “Go in the other room, please.”
Mighty stomping, crumbs flying.

We sat with the sun making stripes all around us. I didn’t check Facebook like I really, really wanted. Instead I engaged, surprising even myself.

“What are you going to be when you are grown up?”
“I have no idea.” She chews a bit. “I like art.”
“You are great at art.”
“I learned this thing at school where you hold some clay between two fingers and you stretch it.” She tips her chin and clanks the spoon against her teeth. (Yes, my children save extra brown sugar for scooping at the end.) However I’m more interested in the fact she’s telling me something I hadn’t heard yet. I always wonder how to pull these details out of them each day. Yank electronics and watch them bloom, I suppose.
“That’s cool. You could go to college for design or architecture.”
“I want to make a house with secret passageways and stuff.”
“I love that.”

Before I sense it, a connection is born and a morning is changed.
Who cares about homework? Not me.

 

 

 

 

 

Why This Day Matters

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Yesterday, December 5th, is as gone as the life of a pig farmer who nearly changed my life.

Brown, plaid, and in every house in America in the 80’s was the chair where I clung to my mom and tried to understand why my daddy wasn’t coming back. It is my earliest memory, and the start of my changing family.

My dad remarried and we became a split unit of four with weekends divvied up and holidays traded.
This was my worldview until about fourth grade. The year a flame-haired boy brought a condom to school and showed all of us aghast and giggling 10-year olds in the back of the room by the books what they actually looked like: gross. The year my best friend in class got glasses and I became recklessly jealous to the point of lying at my eye exam soon after. The year I first became self-conscious about my growling stomach before lunch, especially sitting next to Flame-Hair who seemed eons ahead in all things worldly and mature.

But it was also the year my mom did something quite unlike my mom. She feathered and sprayed her bangs, gathered her courage, and went on a blind date. With a farmer. A, PIG farmer. 

This, of course, is my version. And this is what I know of the events.

He wasn’t what I expected, probably because he wasn’t my dad and yet was a man allowed to hold hands with my mom in the gleam of the car dashboard, kiss her around the corner far from where they thought I was standing, and with the power to bring a stock of Pepsi and Nutty Bars to our cabinets. Which wasn’t allowed ever. EVER. It was a strange series of transitions. One that scared and excited me.

I remember his moustache and how fast his mouth moved when he auctioned. I remember how he sang Garth Brooks and knew his way around a farm like a worm in the dirt. I remember fall, and driving around rural Missouri for leaves of every species on my science project list that were then sealed between old picture album pages.

I got real, authentic ropers (hick talk for boots), and a short whip for showing hogs at fair. I got sisters, and new cousins who lived just a house down the road. I got a trampoline (a moment of silence here) that I apparently knew less about than he. It only took one instance of his perfectly timed jumping to catapult me like a broken arrow straight in the air, and have me pleading for my life. I got more family.

Almost.

After school one day in December, I walked in my house to find a tissue, and my mom’s face smushed behind it. Beside her were two or three very close friends. My gut rocked and I wanted nothing more than to find an empty house with only pretzels and mustard for snacks and consecutive reruns of Save By The Bell and Full House until my mom got off work. Please, can we just do that day instead of this one?

We didn’t know he was sick. We didn’t know he’d stopped taking his medication. We didn’t know he was a prisoner of his own thoughts and that his greatest idea for relief would be a tower of hay bales and a rope. We didn’t know.

The months that followed were difficult to say the least. Books with titles like, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, started showing up around her dresser. Apples and peanut butter went on hold while she closed her hollow wooden doors and sobbed choking cries, her wedding dress limp and empty on a hanger in the closet.

No child should have to hear that. And no mother should have to be that heartbroken.

I talked to her today, nineteen years later. I’d forgotten details, she’d forgotten it was the 5th until it was already the 6th.

We are here. We did survive it. And although I don’t know what the plan would have been, or should have been, I know that I may not have had as many weekends hunting, golfing, fishing, and lazing with my dad if she’d remarried. I may not have ever gone to college at sixteen. I may never have met the one freshman student who took my breath away. I may have not changed my last name or had three kids or lived in my favorite place in the world. She may not have come on that journey with me.

So whatever the plan was, we’re okay with the new one now.