My mother passed away at the age of 54, of complications from cervical cancer. The funny thing is I remember the good times and the bad times, all as part of a big pattern, a bittersweet swath of memory, if you will. That I loved her deeply and miss her is always in the background. After you get done reading this boring diary, you might exclaim "how can he think that way about his mom! "
We grew up in a time before certain things were nearly universally understood as just not acceptable.
Most of the time we lived in relative poverty, not exactly dirt poor, but lower than lower middle class, if you know what I mean.
My first and only memory of my mother and father together as a married couple who actually wanted to be married was us all sitting together watching something -- I want to say that it was the Twilight Zone, with both of them talking to me about how I really, really needed to learn to tie my shoes, right now! I must have been three or so at the time. Slow learner, I guess.
My next memory is of being at my grandparents house outside playing in the yard. My father came out the back door screaming at my mom first, and then my mother. I don't remember if she was exactly throwing things at my dad, but the mood of the occasion was like that. This was also right around the time of the first Moon Landings. I remember my fascination of watching this on a tiny, barely functioning TV (I don't remember whether it was black and white and color) in my grandparents' house, with my grandma quietly ironing clothes in the background, while my parents screamed and threw things at each other (either metaphorically or for real).
I loved my grandparents house. They used to burn leaves in the fire pit in the back yard. I love the smell of burning leaves to this day. Again, these days, with air pollution ordinances, something that would never be allowed!
After that, nothing. Most of my early childhood I remember in unpleasant little vignettes.
The next memory I have, my mother was divorced, I was five, and we had another member of the family, my little brother. He was conceived in the midst of the horror that was my parents' divorce. My father stayed in California and we moved "back" to Colorado, where I was born and where my grandparents lived.
My brother's younger childhood was not without difficulty. I remember the frustration every very young child with an infant sibling remembers .. of having a brother, but not yet a playmate, and a single parent whose first concern must be with the young one. His young life did not start without difficulty either. He wasn't learning to walk, and we later found out the reason why that he had a spiral fracture in one of his legs. I don't know how that happened, and that is another thing you learn when you remember these things -- not to ask questions.
So, with my father gone and being raised by a single parent, life continued at least economically, much as it had. My father's and mother's ongoing hatred of each other led to things such as my mother not even getting the minimum child support the court had ordered from my dad, and also, me knowing about it even as a seven or eight year old.
At one point, for a couple of years, I went to live with my dad. At this point, there was a growing schism between the way my mom lived and the way my dad did. He had money at this point .. but I remember the embarrassment of going to school with nothing but shorts with holes in them. At some point it was decided that he was just not emotionally equipped to deal with raising a young son, and so, back to mom I went.
My mom had one hell of a temper. There was that time that she threw all of our Christmas presents in the trash on Christmas eve. There was another where she packed up all of our belongings and told my brother and I to go live somewhere else, and only caught us in tears halfway down the block. And, oh, that time she smashed every piece of furniture in the house because I said, in the way young kids do without thinking, I wanted to go back to live with my dad again.
In the present day, we would have been called latchkey kids at certain points. My mom had to work and there was no babysitter. She also had several bouts with the cervical cancer that later was to claim her life.
So I learned to grow up fast and learn things that most people say young children should not know until they're much, much older. She worked at a pool hall, and we had pool hall chile more often than not. Of course, my mom would also date on occasion so I got to learn the ins and outs of that.
If it sounds like I'm whining about these experiences, I'm not. I'm actually grateful for them. I learned more about life than most people do by the time they're 20, by the time I was, oh, about 12 or so.
I said my mom had a hell of a temper. In addition to leading to the not-so-nice things I discussed above, my mother had no time or patience with injustices in the world, either big or little. I would later discover that when adults were doing unjust or just bad things to others, out of laziness or misanthropy or just whatever, they did not want to ever see my mom's face or cross her in any way.
Whatever her excessive proclivities with her own children, my mother just had no time for people making the world a worse place. And, in her own small way, she got results. People would often comment to her, and later to my stepdad, what polite well behaved my brother and I were. Oh, you can chalk this up to the abuse we suffered, and I would never defend it, but we also learned how to both take care of ourselves and the standards of conduct that were expected when you deal with other people.
My mom had a soft spot with animals. Later on in our childhoods, things got better for us, especially with regard to the little material things in life every child expects, and my mom marrying my fundamentalist Christian stepdad, who divorced his wife to marry my mom! Things did get better in that way. I had the opportunity to live as most middle class teenagers get to live.
So, by the time they got their own house, I shuttled back to California to college, failed at that (that's a whole other story!) and came back, and went away again. My mom converted one of the basement rooms into a hamstery and an aviary. She became well known as a person who raised pure and rarebred canaries and finches. And, when I was living in Colorado again, we finally, with me as a young adults, became the best of friends. Whatever I was doing or wherever I was living, we often got together on mornings when I wasn't working and played cribbage, the family game. I finally gave her the nickname she had exemplified her whole life, and it stuck with her -- "Mount Saint Sharon".
You see, as a young adult, in my own quiet way, and with us becoming the best of friends, I had finally learned to stand up to my mom. The only person in the world she could not browbeat and intimidate was me. In my own quiet way, I had learned to give no ground when I'm right and I know I'm right.
But no one who hurt animals or small children (except, I guess, her own, in her younger years, heh) would ever, ever be safe from HER.
Later on, I found the person of my dreams, and went to be with him (in California, AGAIN!) and mom went on with her life.
My partner, Terry, passed away from pancreatic cancer, in 1997. By that time, I had built a life in California, and was loathe to leave it. The whole back and forth between Colorado and California had begun to wear on me. In may of that year, my mom called, and let me know her cervical cancer had returned.
In December of 1997 (December 9th) she passed away. I flew back to be with her at her bedside before she went, but she never had a lucid moment. The complications of the radiation treatment had burned a hole in a place where no hole should be and over my objections, my brother and stepfather let her pass. You see, I had the delusion that she had told me she wanted to live, even with the sepsis having eaten away her bones and organs.
Now I am back here, in my home state once again. I don't know if I'll leave again .. it isn't the same state without her.
Mount Saint Sharon sleeps forever.