giggles & grind

When I was in my early twenties, my therapist asked me a simple question. “What’s your earliest memory of your mom?”

I remember sitting there, trying to answer, and realizing something that hit me harder than I expected. My mother wasn’t the first woman I remembered. She wasn’t even the second. She was the fourth. That realization said more than any story I could tell.

My mom left when I was very young. I don’t know exactly how long she was gone, a year or two possibly. What I do know is that my dad raised me. He showed up. He stayed.

But he also believed it was his duty to replace her. That’s a story for another day–the revolving door of “mothers” that followed. But today I am writing about the mother who was supposed to be mine.

My mother had everything going for her on the surface. She was beautiful. She was incredibly smart. She had a personality that drew people in instantly. She could walk into any room and leave with friends. But none of that translated into a stable life.

She was always poor. Always struggling. Always surviving, but never building anything. She worked odd jobs here and there, but nothing ever lasted. The last time I remember her having a job was when I was sixteen. After that, she lived on assistance, food banks, and whatever she could get from other people. And she was good at getting it.

She knew how to make people feel sorry for her. She knew how to pull on heartstrings. And for a long time, I was one of those people.

As an adult, I would take her grocery shopping, buy clothes and school supplies for my siblings, send money, send gifts. I tried to fill the gaps that were never supposed to be mine to fill.

I wasn’t helping her build a life, I was helping her maintain a cycle.

My mother had five kids, but she only raised two of them. She never physically hurt me, but the two she raised had a different reality. One filled with anger, physical and verbal abuse, neglect, and sometimes worse. I seen and heard enough to know what they carried.

What I carried was different. I was the outsider, the one she didn’t choose. The one who felt like wasn’t enough, like she needed other kids to replace whatever she thought I was lacking.

My mom lived for attention. For being skinny. For being beautiful. For being wanted, especially by men. She chased that feeling for years. But eventually, time caught up. People moved on. Friends got sober, incarcerated, or just left. And when that happened, she was left alone.

In the end, her world got very small. An apartment. Cheap beer. Hand-rolled cigarettes. Books and notepads scattered across a kitchen tables. Drinking from the moment she woke up, to the time she passed out, every single day.

The lifestyle caught up to her. She lost the last person that was providing her handouts. Her solution was to end her pain by way of a mixture of medications. And she failed. She failed to end her life.

When I entered her home after she was taken to the hospital, I found flies–dead, alive, covering nearly every inch of her apartment. Half-empty glasses of beer. Dried up vomit in the bathtub that was also filled with trash. The place looked abandoned, even though she’d been living there.

I slept that night in a lawn chair pulled from my car, holding a pistol, staring at the broken front door. Her apartment was known for random visitors with no respect for knocking before entering, usually drunk or high, and normally a stranger to me.

Days before I spent the night there, she had called all of her children. It was the Fourth of July. She was saying goodbye. We didn’t realize it at the time, but it felt off. Not her usual drunken rambling. Something was different. Three days later, her youngest child found her. Unresponsive.

At the hospital, after she finally woke up, she didn’t recognize me. She wouldn’t walk. Was incoherent. And was in diapers. Within 48 hours of her last know consciousness, she woke in the hospital to her brain doing a complete flip.

The doctor told me she had attempted suicide. The cherry on the sunday was that they also diagnosed her with Korsakoff syndrome (alcohol-induced dementia). They said it had likely been developing for a long time, but no one noticed. When someone is always drunk, the signs blur together.

The attempt is what pushed her brain over the edge. There was no going back.

I returned to her apartment to start sorting through her stuff, looking for relevant documents related to insurance, prescriptions, contacts for her landlord. I found the pill bottles. I found the letter. One letter, addressed to all five of her children. A letter that I never showed to any of my other siblings.

None of her children accepted to take her in. The state stepping in, and she was placed in a memory care facility, where she still is, and where she will live the rest of her life.

I visited her once, shortly after she was moved in. It felt like a prison. It was cold, empty, unfamiliar. I haven’t been back.

There’s a lot I could say about why I won’t reach out to her. But the truth is, it’s not the suicide attempt that sits with me. It’s everything before it. The empty seats at my games she promised to attend, the constant letdowns, the waiting, the hoping, the disappointment over and over again.

The kind of childhood that doesn’t just stay in childhood. It follows you. It shows up as anxiety, as needed certainty, as not being able to wait for good things because you’re used to them not happening at all.

If there is one thing I can giver her credit for–something complicated, something uncomfortable–it’s this. She showed me exactly what kind of mother I never wanted to be.

I had my first daughter at seventeen. I wasn’t perfect, not even close. I made mistakes and had to grow up while I was raising her. But I paid attention, learned, corrected myself. I chose differently.

Today, both my daughters are everything I needed when I was a child. They are confident, they are honest (sometimes shockingly honest), and they are fully themselves unapologetically. They come to me when they need help, they trust me, they know I will show up. Every time.

I am not a perfect mother, but I am the mother I wish I had, and that means something.

My mother is alive. I don’t call, I won’t call. I don’t visit, I can’t visit. I don’t check in, I refuse to check in. There’s no space for her in my life.

Sometimes I wonder if she thinks about me, if she wishes she could see or know me.

The only space she exists in is in my dreams. She shows up in them frequently, vividly. She did last night, and usually once or twice a week. Sometimes she’s who she used to be, sometimes she’s who she is now, and sometimes she’s like me.

I don’t know what I’ll feel when she dies.

Relief.

Closure.

Regret.

Maybe all three. Maybe nothing.

What I do know is this. She missed out. She missed out on me, my life, and my wonderful children. And my girls–they are extraordinary.

My daughters are everything she could have been. They are smart, beautiful, magnetic, and good. They are using their gifts to build something real, to have healthy lives, and to pursue their ambitions. And my mother, she will never get to see that. She gave up having a wonderful life, a life that each of my daughters have and will continue to have.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to understand my mother. Why was she the way she chose to be? Why couldn’t she love me the way I needed? I know I will never fully understand.

What maters is what I chose to do with what I was given. I didn’t get the mother I deserved, but my daughters did. And for me, that’s where the story finally changes.

My story isn’t defined by the mother I didn’t have, it’s defined by the mother I became in spite of her.