I love words, I asked my mom to give me the best gift ever - her words.
On Christmas Day she sent a file with the start of her life story. I am moved to tears. The story deserves to be shared. I asked if I could share it here. She said it is a gift to me and I can do with it what I want. So without further ado.. My Mom's story:
I had a
lot of strange thoughts as a child. The
odd thing is that I didn’t think they were strange. It was only upon the telling that I realized
that others didn’t have that common belief system. Now, don’t waste time trying to imagine what
my strange thoughts were. They weren’t
interesting enough to waste your thoughts on.
Here’s an example. I thought that
as humans ate, the food filled up their bodies from the feet up. One would only have to poop when that used up
food reached the place that all poop needs to reach. I don’t think that was my strangest thought,
but I don’t think it was my least strangest either – it is just given as an
example, so you can begin to know me as a child.
I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in what is most politely called the
I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in what is most politely called the Deep South .
I was
considered quite bright as a child, which in a way complicated the building up
of my knowledge base. Family members
just assumed that I knew things.
Extended family members (who made up most of the people we associated
with) didn’t really care what I knew.
But I often ate little nibbles of information from the very table of
life where others didn’t even know I dined.
You see, children were often unnoticed, much less assessed as to their
intellect. So I passed through my days,
gathering tidbits of information which I somehow fitted into my knowledge base,
while discarding other tidbits which no longer seemed accurate, interesting, or
even believable. I consider myself
fortunate to have grown up in what is most politely called the Deep South .
Everyone I knew, even those I was not related to, were interesting. If they weren’t interesting on their own,
their neighbors and friends made them interesting by decorating their mundane
lives with half truths about their pasts, presents, or futures.
Oddly
enough, the topic of which I knew the least was myself. I didn’t know who I was. I only knew that I had a mother, a
grandmother, a grandfather, and an aunt.
Those were the people who lived in my house. During my younger years, I never questioned –
didn’t even wonder – about why the makeup of my household was nothing like the
makeup of the other homes on the block.
When my friends had to go because a mom had called them inside, I was
listening for the voice of a Me-Maw.
Only rarely did a child ask me what, or who, a Me-Maw was. I knew intellectually that she was my
grandmother, but I didn’t quite understand why she had taken on the jobs that
were usually done by the moms of the neighborhood. Since most of my early playmates were my
cousins, I didn’t have to explain to them.
My adult self wonders what stories and explanations they had been told
by their parents to explain the makeup of our household. I could ask them now. I am on good terms and in contact with at
least two of them. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to know what mean or sad stories
they were told about me. Or maybe I
don’t want to hear the lie they would have to make up quickly in order to
respond to my question. Either way, I’m
content to just let it be.
“Good” girls didn’t come home pregnant
a swelling in a belly
Later
on in life, it became obvious that the joining of babymaking material was not
something that was going to happen easily to my mother. I can imagine her slowly coming to the
realization of what had happened. She
was probably sick as only a newly pregnant woman can be. And the changes in her body so obvious in the
mirror, the shower, and the bath had to be hard to ignore. But ignore she did. Her brain helped of course. When one doesn’t want to believe something,
it doesn’t exist. But you can’t deny a
fetus into oblivion. It keeps
growing. And growing. And growing.
Every day, something is added to that mistake. A heart starts to beat; little toes grow on
little legs that soon begin kicking so hard, the movement is felt. And a teenager lies in bed at night and tries
to plan away something that cannot be planned away no matter how many prayers,
how many threats, or how many pleas. Until
one day, all the plans explode, and the growing truth becomes too obvious for
others not to see. In this case, the
teen with the secret is sent outside to hang the clothes on the clothesline
because that is the way it was done in 1952.
But some reason – maybe a mother checking to see if the job was being
done right, or maybe she just looked out to see a bird she heard chirp. But what she saw took her breath the way that
no bird could have done regardless of its beauty. She saw the sun – the same sun that would dry
her clothes and leave them smelling summer sweet – shining through the thin
shirt her clothes-hanging daughter was wearing.
And the almost autumn sun showed a swelling in a belly that she
recognized from the two times before when her body had looked the same
way. And the pit of her stomach told her
what was true way before her mind – or her heart – could accept it.
1 comment:
Beautiful. Really beautiful.
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