My friend left a voice memo about my half-brother and mom because apparently he's posting a lot on facebook, and I'm not sure why she cares or what it has to do with me. I haven't seen him in years and I never log on to facebook. She knows that.
(Listening to a grown man's drunk 3am manic perma-crises every night, then every day a grown woman's obsessive namecalling maxing out my entire voicemail system while I worked two jobs in college in poverty was overwhelming, so I changed my number (almost 20 years ago) to see what it felt like to experience life without daily & nightly crises of two people older than me, who were too unstable to offer the guidance and wisdom I craved in youth. My life improved without them.)
But for some reason my beloved meddling friend wanted me to know about my half-brother's posts. So I logged on. There was a photo of him with my mom, smiling, blind, old. Her hands unrecognizably pale, veiny. Her smile, still beautiful, like a lost little girl, the way she always seemed to me. Of course I started crying. The kind where your stomach shakes while your heart gasps for air but you're on the phone so you have to hide it, but they know because the facetime video was fucking shaking in your hand and you were a little bit hyperventilating. It hurts.
Why do people have to get old and die?
My mom is dying and I didn't get to have much of her before her mind deteriorated to the point of me being physically terrified of her.
I want my mom back. The way she used to be. She didn't teach me how to surf yet. She said she would someday. This woman who rode a literal tidal wave like Tiamat in 1968. My mother. Fearless sea Goddess who birthed me, and despite herself, kept me alive. Nature Herself. Fierce, terrifying, intense, incredible, charming, creative, free spirited, fun. Beautiful. (And nothing like me.) The cool mom all my friends wished they had. That there, was my mom. The one standing tall with her surfboard before I was born, tan and gorgeous and not giving a shit. The one walking naked around the house, swearing, smoking cigarettes in her garden, joking about the church ladies in town who couldn't hang. You couldn't shame her if you tried. Oh the wonderful marvelous god jokes though. I laughed. She was very good at making me laugh.
If you saw photos of us together at any age, you'd never guess we're related. Even less so for my brother, her favorite. She often reminded me that I didn't look like her and that it was a disappointment. I was my dad's, she said. I forgave her for that. I had bigger goals than being "pretty" anyway and I was weirdly secure despite not measuring up to my mom's caucasian standards. I was a different bird entirely. A mixed bird she didn't know what to do with.
But she TRIED. Pushed me out of her womb with a fearlessness I'll never know. I'm grateful for the psychotic tidal wave riding warrior who gave me life. I wasn't the daughter she wanted and she wasn't the mom I wanted. But c'mon. Even just pregnancy alone is some warrior shit. She gave me everything she was capable of, and had my dad not blocked her from the therapy she wanted, maybe she would have left him and found happiness again. I digress.
I want to go back in time to the part when I was still able to hug her, when she was still happy. When she was girl scout leader and amazing at it and her nickname was Manzanita and she had a tribe of little girls walking barefoot through the creek and painting clay beads to wear proudly around our necks with our plant nicknames, all of us looking up to her, eager to hear what new adventures she had in store that day. You really can't say she didn't try to ace motherhood.
But my mom was a wild woman. A beast and a goddess and every mood of every season in one soul. She never belonged in a cage and no man should ever have persuaded her to marry or carry babies she didn't 100% want. My not having children is a personal stand for the woman who sacrificed herself so I could grow up and have the choices she didn't have.
That's all I want to say.
6:43 p.m. - 2021-12-04