It’s been too long since my last blog post. My last one was about resignation and moving
on, and I’m sorry to say I haven’t yet lived up to the goals I set in it. I nearly breezed through Halloween, with only
occasional moments of sadness on Bunny’s favorite day of celebration. During Thanksgiving week, rather than sitting
around mourning the holidays past, I went to Louisiana and had a great time visiting
family and friends. I kept Hanukkah in
the holiday rotation, and caught up on my candle lighting when I got home. I was doing well enough emotionally that I
figured December would be a piece of cake.
Wrong!
This year, I at least mustered enough courage to celebrate
Christmas. I got a tinsel tree,
something I’ve wanted since I was a child coveting my maternal grandmother’s. It was
gorgeous! That’s as far as the
decorating went. I couldn’t bear to set
up the manger, which had seen Bunny and me through many Christmases, so I gave
it to Corey. The stockings never came out of their
box. In other words, except for a few tree
ornaments, I couldn’t make myself put out any reminders of what Christmas used
to be.
I was well into the second week of December when depression hit
me like a freight train. If you’ve never suffered from depression, thank your
lucky stars. It runs in my family, so I’ve
had a lot of first- and second-hand experience with it. I can’t point to any particular event that
triggered it, but that’s the beauty of depression—you deal with a series of
small set-backs and think you’re getting by okay. Then one day, you realize that all these
little frustrations have secretly banded together to build into a big dark snowball
that engulfs you before you even saw it coming.
Surprise!
By the end of the month, I managed to get back on course, just
in time for the second anniversary of Bunny’s death, January 1st. Surprisingly--given the hellish month December
had been--I had a fairly tear-free day of quiet reflection. I think that by that point, I was emotionally
healthy enough to be so over the incessant sadness.
And now, another second anniversary looms: two years ago
tomorrow, my mother died. I’ve said before that with her death so soon after
Bunny’s, I feel like I hadn’t fully mourned her loss. I made up for that lost grief in December,
which may be one of the reasons the second Christmas was so much harder than
the first without the two of them.
I also starting wondering, for the first time, whether Bunny’s
loss affected her to such an extent that she couldn’t bounce back from her own
health problems. She was in the hospital
within days of Bunny’s death, and unfortunately, with all the trauma that
preceded her admission, I don’t remember the substance of any conversations we
had. I don’t even remember whether we
had them at all, although my sister
Julie assures me that we did. Maybe one
day I will recover those memories.
I’ve written so much about Bunny that even people who didn’t
know him probably have a good idea what he was like. I haven’t written nearly as much about my
mother, until now. She was a true
Gemini, a study in contrasts. By turns,
she could be smart as a whip or dumb as a doornail, but usually the
former. She could be sweet as honey or fierce
as a tiger, but mostly somewhere in between.
She rarely kept her opinion to herself but could also be maddeningly secretive.
Reading that description, I see a lot of my own traits, or
variations of them. Most of all, Mama
was resilient. I really don’t remember
interacting with her very much as a young child. I hung around with my father,
almost like his shadow. Then, suddenly,
he was gone. I was nine years old, living
with a parent I barely knew. I didn’t
realize it at the time, but I learned many lessons from how she handled the fallout
from her unexpected divorce.
At the time, no one else in my class had parents who were
divorced. I knew cousins whose marriages had broken, but
they were city folks. In our rural town,
we were very much a topic of conversation.
She didn’t seem overly affected by being the talk of the town, but I’m
sure that’s because she was putting on a poker face for her children. Lesson: don’t be bothered by what people say
about you—live your life.
Other than the first day or two, she didn’t mope around. She had too much to do to let it slow her
down. Not that she didn’t give voice to
what she was feeling, because she did, for what I thought was way too
long. But the lessons I learned were
from both her positive and negative modeling: suck it up and deal, and don’t
hold a grudge.
When they were married, my father did all the home maintenance. I don’t think my mother had ever so much as
changed a light bulb, because I remember the first time she did it. If she’d built a rocket from scratch, she
couldn’t have been more pleased. I also
recall her doing some kind of minor repair that would have taken Daddy two
minutes. She could have asked my paternal
grandfather for help—he lived right next door—but she didn’t. Screwdrivers and wrenches in hand, she cursed
and cried and banged around for hours, until she finally succeeded. In the process, she taught me to never give
up, no matter how frustrating or impossible the task seems. She
also taught me that I didn’t need a man to rescue me from a difficult
situation.
Finally, there was the most memorable lesson, an episode she
would recount with glee for the rest of her life. When I was about 13, my
sister Julie and I were playing down the road with our neighbors, at a spot we
called The Mountains. This was, of
course, when dinosaurs roamed and kids did not have cell phones and they only
came inside when it was too dark outside to see. There
was a sand pit down the road—a cliff of crusty sand about 14 feet high with a patch
of soft sand at the bottom. That sand stretched
for about another 12 feet and ended at a small body of water.
We didn’t even go near the water—it wasn’t the attractive part
of The Mountains. The fun part was
climbing to the top of the cliff and jumping down to the soft sand below. Sounds really low-tech, I know, but I’d still
do it today if I could. Mama knew where we were that day, because she
had plans later and needed to know where to find us when she got ready to
leave.
We were having fun when suddenly, our grandfather appeared at
the top of the cliff, irate and screaming that there was “forty feet of water.”
When my step-father Donald first heard
the story, he burst out laughing, because he knew there was no way the water
was more than six feet deep. Pops’ tone made it clear that we were in big trouble.
Our grandparents’ house was between The Mountains and our house: Julie and I were
to stop there so he could beat us. Yeah,
those were the days when you could still beat children.
As we got on our bikes, I told Julie and the neighbors I had no
intention of stopping at Pops’ house, and suggested we all pedal as fast as we
could past it. Julie will deny to
this day that she knew beating was in store. Maybe she blocked it out, but Pops couldn’t
have been more clear in his intentions, and this wouldn't be the kind of beating where you got to pick your own switch.
Anyway, she stopped and I didn’t.
I pedaled furiously all the way home, threw down my bike, and ran
screaming into the house.
Mama was in her bathroom putting on her makeup and came out to
her bedroom, expecting some disaster. I started
to tell her what happened, when my grandmother came into the room, quiet as a
Ninja. Some backstory: my mother and
paternal grandmother had never argued with each other before. My grandmother was a saintly creature who
never even raised her voice. She had a
perfectly keen intellect, but she was from “the man is the king of the castle” school. She would follow any and all of Pops’
directives, no matter how flawed. Also, I
believe that, at the time, my grandmother was my mother’s supervisor at work.
Grandma explained that we
had been playing in “forty feet of water” and that Pops had already whipped Julie
and that it was my turn. My mother was
not as soft-spoken as Grandma.
“No one is going to beat THIS CHILD!” she roared. Note: if I’d been doing something wrong, she’d
have been the first in line to beat me. “I
knew where they were playing.”
“But they could have drowned,” Grandma retorted. Passive-aggressive implication: what kind of
mother lets her kids play where they could drown?
“If they were playing in the water, then why aren’t her CLOTHES
WET?” Ah, logic! Grandma couldn’t muster
a comeback to that one. She left the
room and the house. Or so we thought.
Mama returned to her makeup application, bitching loudly about
my controlling grandparents always in our business and talking about moving to
the next town over. Next thing we knew,
Ninja Grandma had reappeared. Not a word
was said about the snarky comments; she had come to collect me to go to a
nursery while Mama was out. The lesson
that day: stand up to authority if authority is wrong.
