Think About Love
I've always seen my mother as some weak and weary individual...a southern belle thrown into the chaotic world of being a wife and mother.
She always tried to love me like she should have loved me, with wide open arms, no inhibitions- but there was always a sort of vulnerable little hesitation about her that I never understood...and so, as it happened, my grandmother became more like my mother, and my mother became more like the annoying older sister that I could never get off my back. My mother was always fine with this arrangement, possibly thinking that living with me in the late afternoon hours and the early mornings before school was enough.
My bond with my grandmother was a iron one.
We couldn't have loved each other more.
She was my rock when I felt the world crowding me, my blessing at bedtime, and the arms I ran to when I needed someone to embrace.
She discovered she had cancer when I was sixteen...and three years later, she lost her battle.
My mother found herself in a thick situation.
See, my mother depended upon my grandmother as much as I did- if not, moreso. My mother's birth father left her, and her two siblings, when they were very young. My mother remained dependent upon my grandmother for emotional support. With my grandmother gone, and us both missing her, it's easy to assume it was a recipe for disaster. It was.
Big time.
My own father, who was always really verbally amusive towards me, was getting especially tough on me since my coming of age. Now that I was in college, he believed that I should have been out of the house, on my own, though I was only nineteen.
One night, my mother and father got into a huge fight...which, wasn't abnormal...
But this time my father, in a drunk rage, points his finger in my mother's face and says menacingly
"And I was still paying for your college tuition when you were married to that other guy."
This sort of startled me.
Other guy?
What other guy?
In a well-written letter the next day (so was my mother's style, she could never just TELL me anything), my mother explains she was married before... briefly... to an unnamed man... when she twenty...
She married my father when she was twenty-six.
Had me at twenty-seven.
I was struck.
I couldn't believe that I had been living this, without ever having really known her or her agenda, for the whole nineteen years of my existance.
I was really angry at first. Not only about that, but about so many things that had built up that had be at odds against her. So many things were running through my mind. So many things about my mother that I never understood and remained enraged about.
I tried to make sense of it, but couldn't.
So I stopped.
I just stopped questioning.
And I tried to understand...
I know how she is, probably better than anyone now.
She has this thing about her, where she's strong and incredibly weak at the same time.
She's strong enough to stand up to my father, but she's weak because she won't leave him.
She was strong enough to leave the man who hurt her first, but she's weak because she still keeps the pain he left her with.
I realized there was nothing I could do, but love her.
Nothing at all, but love her.
It's that simple, and yet, that hard.
I never approached the topic again with my mother. I'm sure she thought I'd be completely destroyed by it... but in theory it explains so much for me. It puts me a bit at ease about how she is the way she is.
There's no way she needs forgiveness from ME for leaving someone who hurt her. I applaud her for it, and in fact, have an entirely new respect for the way she handles things. Though there's still a lot I have left to understand, and unearth, about this woman...
I'm ready.
I just have to see her with open eyes,
and know that I do love her, as her daughter, and I always will.
