memory

i can't sleep. the heat is creeping in to announce the pending arrival of summer. i hate the heat. i am laying here. tossing and turning. thinking. remembering.

i am 7 years old. it is easter. i am scared and saucy. this is not uncommon. i am wearing my favorite shirt. a button down shirt, maybe some sort of silk, it is a very busy pattern. i am wearing a blazer. i have just received a card with five dollars, from an aunt or a neighbor. my mother is sad. my mother is always sad. i was going to make her happy. two blocks away from our apartment there is a photo shop. i used to go in there alot. i used to go into a lot of the local businesses a lot. nobody ever gave me the crossing the street lesson. i just knew how to get away. i walked the two blocks. i said hello to my old familiar friend, the photo shop owner, and asked what he could help me get with my five dollars to make my mother smile. they had a cut out of marilyn monroe, i always said hi to her too. he suggested making a picture magnet. i said, only if marilyn could be in it. he took the picture. a polaroid. a magnet was made. momma smiled. i saved the day.

it's easter again. 3 years later. mom is sad. still sad. times are hard. times are always hard. i am sent to get my sister something to wear on easter morning before i help my mother make baskets out of whatever is left in the local general store. i go to fifth avenue, the main shopping block, filled with the smell of cinnamon sticks and the sound of chicano music. always crowded. i went to the kid's clothing store. i remember that my sister loves to wear her construction style boots. and i remember that in movies fun ladies wore those kinds of boots with floral dresses. it is 1995. i buy her a denim/floral dress and white leggings. ten dollars. five dollars under budget, which will make mom happy. i saved the day again.

i have to jot these down. i am afraid to lose them.

my moral compass

this one is about him. my dad. the man who taught right from wrong. every single memory i have of my father is of him standing for everything that is good and right and true. i remember christmas cards to my mother, after divorce. during the silence. in those cards cash. needed money. the means to give us, his children, a little something christmas morning. i never talk about how poor i was growing up, because i never feel like i have the right to speak on that topic. because for most of the time anyone i currently associate with has known me, i have been comfortable, or with the means to obtain the things i want. growing up this was not the case. like so many things in my life there has always been duality. mom and dad. strength and wisdom.

to be blunt and give as little self pity to this story as i can. when my parents split it was good. it was, i think, an attempt to let one of them walk away alive from a ship that was sinking fast. drunks, who come from drunks, with troubled kids, it was all too much. more kids. more bills. one job. one steady flow of income. the pressure, i imagine must have weighed him down. so my dad, in an act of survival, saw a life preserver and grabbed hold. i have never been like so many children of divorce, optimistic for a norman rockwell painting they could never be. i know my mother's abandon and need were draining. i believe that had they stayed together they would both be dead now.

my father taught me to do the right thing. early. when they split 75% of his take home pay was put in my mother pocket. he kept just enough money to eat (a little) and give money to the house he was staying in. legal matters ensued. money distributed. and still everyweek he would bring her, my mother, food and help. aid in battle she never could have won. a battle to survive.
i know, from him, the importance of helping whenever you can. of giving that extra bit, even if it might strain you. of favors and selflessness. of giving, without bells and whistles.

the silver lining

when you come from crazy you convince yourself that, at times, the terrible things that happen to you are deserved-stops on your on kilter journey. providence. you think that all hurdles you face are deserved. in short you never really ask for more. the more that can cure.

mary, mother of the motherless

mother's day is rather terrible when you are motherless. In a year, in a day, in an hour, there are reminders left and right of your loss. of her, she who has all the answers. she who is gone. no day is more full of those reminders than mother's day. Especially when you are not yourself a mother and there are no evolutionary prospects to make you one.

i try, though it is difficult, not to think of her on days like this. the darkest days. try and try as i might, she is in my mind, non stop, my mom. in life she had a big personality, sweeping gestures, dramatic responses, the resemblance sometimes is more than i want to admit to. i wonder, i wonder all the time, if she had lived, would we be friends. would our role reversal, i the parent to her ailing child, would that have made for a friendship. i think it would have.

i dream. i dream of mary. mother mary. mary, mother of the motherless. mary, like my sister, like my grandmother. fragile women all of them. i dream of mary telling me it's ok, and giving me a green light, only i don't drive. what the hell does that mean?

since she has gone, i watch t.v. movies geared at middle aged women, about middle aged women getting a second chance, starting over, rediscovering their high school sweetheart in the wake of their crumbled marriage or recently benign mastectomy. i watch these movies as a way of morning the second chance that seem to evade her. i read novels about women's journeys. journeys to rediscover their past in the middle of their lives on the longest days. you know the type of book i'm speaking of-high quality middle brow fiction by the likes of Elizabeth Berg, Jane Hamilton, and Kaye Gibbons. novels with titles like, Never Change, A Map of The World and A Virtuous Woman. i watch these movies, i read these novels, despite my alterna queer 20 something indie cred, because they connect me to moms, to women of her generation who made good, to the hope i think that lived inside her.

i am seriously losing faith in the world.