There are some dates I’m good with: remembering my childhood best friend’s birthday (most birthdays, actually, whether I know you well or not), the day I moved to Oklahoma, the day I read To Kill a Mockingbird, the day I first bought a grown-up yoga mat; and, then there are those that have slipped into the crevices of my mind, and been stretched into question by time: the day I graduated college (or would have, had I not skipped the ceremony for Hawaii), the day I met my first love, the day I ran my first race. It’s inexplicable, really, why some dates stick and some dates don’t. I can’t find a pattern of good vs bad or old vs new. It’s just what is, I suppose.
A year ago today, I saw my mom for the last time. One could argue that I saw her at the funeral, but we really just shared a room. I didn’t go to the casket. I held my sister in one arm and niece in the other while a line of people created a human curtain in front of her. I think that was by subconscious design on my part, though. That’s a story for another time, and it’s actually a little bit of a funny one. Can funerals be funny?
Anyway, a year ago today, I saw my mom for the last time. It was Dali-esque.. the whole twenty-four hours. It was so surreal that I couldn’t even put pen to paper about it. I honestly still feel like I can’t. The written word works for so many moments in a person life, but it doesn’t do enough for the ones in which you truly see people’s pain manifest itself in such outlandish ways. Even as I sit here trying, I don’t know if this is going to end up being about my mother, about my sister, or about me. Perhaps all three. I mean, it’s hard to tell any of this without telling all of it. After all, as much as we don’t want it to be so, we are all part of each other’s story. Let’s see what happens….
college
I was mid-shift at the Kaffee Klatch when one of my waitstaff handed me the phone. On the other end was my fifteen year old sister sobbing and asking me to come get her. Mom’s screams, interrupted only by the sounds of door slamming and fist banging, were all too familiar, and, always the rescuer, I knew I had to go. Notice I didn’t say hero or savior or anything that honorable. Truth be told, I just wanted the turbulence to end, and my twenty-two year old self knew, absolutely nothing, really, so I told her I’d be there as soon as I could. It must have been midnight before I began the two hour trek home (and as I write this, I realize that I still sometimes call it that. Home. I wonder why that is?), and the only reason I remember that is because it matches the time frame of arriving in Barnum, loading my car, and getting the last speeding ticket of my life at 4am, just miles from my apartment. She slept the entire time, but she’s always been a sleeper - just one more way we are absolute opposites.
Most of those months are a blur. She’d dropped out of school, so I made her work for me, though she was technically too young to receive a check, so I paid her out of my own pocket, and that ended when I caught one of my staff members selling her pot. I honestly can’t recall if that’s when she moved back home or if something else led to that. I’m sure it’s written somewhere, but my writings are scattered (as in literally, geographically scattered), so I don’t know if those memories will ever be recovered. Either way, at some point, she was gone.
Looking back, I don’t know how this wasn’t my second clue to the messy, tortured person she is. At age thirteen, she had her stomach pumped after swallowing a bottle of Tylenol at my aunt’s house.
