| | I feel the need to write about my mom tonight.
 My mom and I never really had what you would call a "good" relationship, but it was always just her and I. She and my blood father (sperm donor) divorced when I was barely a year old. She married a long-haul truckdriver when I was 6, and since we saw him less than 30 days out of the year, it was still just her and I. She couldn't handle his being away, and they ended up divorcing when I was 11. After a year of living with various relatives, I moved to Seattle to live with her...again, just the two of us. She met and married my stepfather Jack when I was 14, and he died of cancer 2 years later. When she died, she had been dating a guy who was a real prick for about 3 years.
Where am I going with this? Well, I've been thinking about relationships and where they've gone wrong in my life (probably a result of my visit with the lawyer yesterday). My mom had the worst luck with men. This is her story.
My mom grew up in Anchorage, Alaska; the 4th child of 6 (John, Linda, Peggy, Cathy, Ernie, and Liz). She was 1/2 Inupiaq eskimo, which branded her as a half-breed amongst her peers. If that wasn't bad enough, her mother was a horrid drunk and they were dirt poor, which only made her social status worse. Mom never really learned to accept herself for who she was. She was smoking cigarettes and pot by the time she was 13. One of her mother's drunken boyfriends raped her when she was 16, and she gave the baby up so it wouldn't have to live with the horror she did. Not very long after, she ran away along with her younger brother and sister to live with her dad in Seattle. She made the oh-so-wise decision to drop out of high school and work.
Enter my blood father, whom I commonly refer to as my sperm donor, since he's never been a part of my life other than by DNA. He was from another world as far as home lives were concerned. They had met in school in Alaska. I'm not quite sure how he got to Seattle and how they got together there, but I was conceived and I have their marriage certificate so it obviously happened. From what my grandma (his mom, and the one that always comes to see me) tells me, they were happy at first, but things went rapidly downhill after the glow of the honeymoon wore off. Mom had been working 3 jobs to keep things afloat. Not to say that he didn't work, I guess they just weren't making it. Once I was born, she quit working and that's definitely where things fell apart. She wouldn't take care of me, the house or herself, so he decided not to work anymore. Great situation, huh? Needless to say the divorce was final not long after that. he disappeared, never paid child support and never came back to see me.
 I know she struggled after he left because some of my earliest memories are of her picking me up at various caretakers and taking me home late at night. We lived with her (bitch) sister Peggy for a few months but that was a really awful arrangement so we finally got our own apartment (you know the apartments at the west end of C street Bo?). The few years we lived there were pretty great, except men came and went in her life. I thought she was happy, but she wasn't really until she met Mike, the truckdriver (the TD). The married quickly and we moved out of our apartment and onto the famed "Shamrock Lane". About a year after we moved there, his mother died of breast and lung cancer, so we moved again to the oh-so-wonderful town of Selma, Oregon to live in his parent's home. Population 200. If that wasn't bad enough, we lived 10 miles out of town. Can you say isolation? I, of course, loved it. The TD bought me a beautiful Appaloosa gelding, and I spent all my free time riding through the countryside. Keep in mind, I was only 8 when we moved here. What 8 year old has that freedom? Anyway...mom couldn't handle that kind of isolation. We lasted a year before she started drinking heavily and doing real drugs, like cocaine and speed. Quite a few bad things happened during that time, including 2 near-death car accidents, my step-sisters living with us for a year (that was worse than the car accidents, believe me), and many other incidentals. The ink was dry on the divorce papers before she had finished serving 6 months of jailtime related to one of her car accidents.
When I went to live with her in Seattle, things were pretty rough for her. Years of drinking and drugging had taken a heavy toll on her looks, which she was always conscious of anyway. The toxins she introduced into her body resulted in partial baldness, rotten teeth, severe acne and cysts on her face, and sallow skin tone. The 3 (yes, 3 altogether) car accidents she had been in left a tracheotomy scar on her throat, mis-shapen collar bones, a 7 inch long railroad track scar on her left arm, and a knee-to-ankle scar on her right lower leg. She had a metal plate in her head, arm and leg, which pained her often. She was sometimes very frightening to look at, and she knew it. I did too, and being a teenager I was ashamed of her. Thank god she met Jack when she did...she had no self-esteem left by that point. If there's anything I can say for Jack, it's that he made her feel worthy and loved again, he showed her the beauty of the spirit inside her, and he brought us back together again as mother and daughter. Unfortunately, he died within 2 years..painfully. My mom took care of him at home...I watched him take his last breaths in my living room. It's harder now to write about it now than experience it then because I was so relieved that he was finally out of his pain. If you haven't known anyone with advanced, incurable cancer, then you don't know how horrible it is to see their pain.
I guess you can say history repeated itself, because not too long after he died, I ran away to live with the TD and his new wife here in Grants Pass. Mom and I had a lot of issues...hers being anger towards my "abandoning" her, and mine towards her never really being there for me. We didn't really repair our relationship until after Faith was born, which was nearly 7 years after I had run away. I began to understand what drove her to take the actions she did all those years.
You see, all mom ever wanted was to be loved, unconditionally and completely. She had that in Jack, but I don't know of any other man that gave that to her. Her mother wasn't able to give it to her. My blood father wasn't able to give it to her. Apparently the TD had several affairs while with her, so he was pretty incapable of giving it to her too. Jack loved her beyond belief...but he died. The last man in her life, the PRICK, played games with her head. He was the one who found her the night she died. The man who played with her emotions was the last one to see her before she died. So even in death, she was alone.
So many times I've wished my mom was here to talk to. Right now is one of those times. I want to ask her why she didn't look to me for love. Despite the fact that she ignored me as a child, beat me when I was even slightly bad, and pushed me away when I needed her most...I loved her unconditionally. She was my mom. She was the only person on this earth who was always there. And now she's gone, and I can't share my life with her anymore. She died because she made bad choices in her life. She had a fatal heart attack at the age of 45. Who dies from a heart attack at 45? I will tell you...someone who has spent years ignoring their family history of heart problems and weakening their heart with drugs and booze. If it hadn't been her heart, then the advanced psoriasis of the liver (which was on the coroner's report) would have gotten her.
I think in death, she's tried to right some of her wrongs. It's because of the native land claims stocks I inherited from her that I received the money I did last year. I think she is trying to put right the things that are wrong in my life, because when I find things are tougher than I can handle and I feel like I can't do it alone anymore...something happens (like the money) that makes it all better. Call it divine intervention or whatever.
I miss you momma. I love you and I hope you're watching over me and Faith and I hope you've finally found the love that you sought in life.
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| | Posted 11/9/2001 10:58 PM - 475 views - 7 comments
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