All the Horrible Girliness

Dear Ma,

I know we just talked about all this on the phone. You were understanding and sweet and took it like you take all the blows life and family deals you. I know you won't be reading this page anymore, but I've come to realize what a big-headed, mean-spirited, superior bitch I've been here, and that the people who read this really don't know who you are, because I only write about you when I'm pissed off.

Your dignity means a lot to me. I want everyone who reads this to know more about you.

Taking care of others isn't your second nature. It's your first. Anyone else would back off when the meth addicted girl comes to the door begging for shelter, but you don't think twice. Anyone else would have alienated their family decades ago for the shit they've put you through, but you continue to care and to try, and not to change them. Anyone else would have called to remind her children of all the things she'd done for them, but time and again we hurt you, and you don't.

Who can hurt you worse than your own child? My son is in my lap now, still groggy from a nap, sucking on my shirt, and I don't know what I'm going to do when this kind of thing happens to me. I won't be able to handle it.

Anyway, enough of my apologies. Everyone, please allow me to tell you about my mother.

After years of being told by her mother that she was ugly and would never find a man who loved her, my ma got married at seventeen years old. On her wedding night, my dad told her he wasn't in love with her. But my ma was seventeen, and her choices were to stay with a husband who didn't love her, and have a chance at her own home and children, or go home to her abusive mother and sister and her absent father and prove them all right. She stayed married.

A few months after her wedding, her husband was in a bad motorcycle accident. He caught on fire. Over 80% of his body was charred. Nobody but my mother thought he had a chance of survival. He was in the hospital for three months, and they didn't have insurance.

Don't forget: at this time, she's still just seventeen years old.

At eighteen, she was pregnant, and she had me at nineteen. She had my brother at twenty-one. She stayed at home with us, made sure we didn't get into trouble, made sure we knew we were loved.

While I was in junior high, I think, my dad's father spent his last months in our home, under hospice care. My ma took care of him during those months. He died in our home, surrounded by family, because of Ma.

More than twenty years after dropping out of high school to get married, Ma got her G.E.D. and started college. During a bitter, long-time-coming divorce and several moves and boyfriends, her son joining the Marines and her daughter fleeing to California with her fiance and her parents moving to Missouri, Ma stayed in college, and excelled. She graduated and became an R.N.

She worked in all different aspects of nursing, including Mom/Baby at the hospital. You'd think that's where she'd want to stay. The start of life can be so rewarding and wonderful. You get to see birth and hold babies every day. But my ma chose to become a hospice nurse. So, every day, she goes into the homes of dying people and cares for them. The hours are long and her patients are not always nice people. Many of them are bitter or senile. Some are panicked about dying. Some of them are nice, but their families are angry. It's Ma's job not only to administer care and medication, but to deal with their fears, to talk them through the process of death. She falls in love with them all. She attends their funerals.

I've mentioned my ma's bad habits a dozen times here. Have I ever written about how badly I miss her? How I call her every day, begging for help with The Bug? How wonderful it was to have her with me in the delivery room, how I might not have been able to do it without her? How much I wish she could have been there with me the first couple weeks of The Bug's life? She is the only one in my life with whom I feel comfortable enough to really cry, or talk for hours. She makes me feel good about myself.

Because her parents raised her to hate herself, she raised me with an ego, the very ego that bitchslaps her on this page all the time.

I wish I could write more. Life with a six month old will go on, no matter how much you wish you could sit quietly and ruminate on the keyboard for hours, and maybe that's the best thing about having a kid. You can't ever just sit and get all deep in your own bullshit. Life is in motion.

But Ma, I want you to know, you're my hero. I wish I could be like you more. Your whole spirit is open to the pain and needs of everyone else, and maybe all your bad vices are just your ways of taking care of yourself, a desperate way of feeling good for just a few minutes in the middle of all the sadness. I'm not saying this to make myself or you feel better. The damage is done. I haven't taken care of your heart. I've been selfish and rude. But I'm writing this because it's true, and long overdue, and I could not have chosen a better mother and grandmother for my Bug.

Love you.

posted by Samus @ 11:43 AM