You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Mother’ tag.

I’ve been crying since I was eight years old. Blame Lurlene McDaniel. I do.

In the summer of 1987, I found death on a shelf at the Lee County Library in Sanford, North Carolina. I had been looking for those pre-teen romance novels, the ones where boys didn’t have naughty intentions and girls said no to drugs even in the midst of the popular kids. I had devoured these sorts of books all summer and had finally exhausted the library’s moderate selection. So, as any other little girl would do, I began perusing books for the coolest, hippest teenage girls on the cover, the girls I wanted to be.

It was time to go and I was desperate to find something to read. By chance (or was it?), I saw a really pretty blond girl, whose hair was crimped and massive, sitting with her mother. I hastily picked up the book and ran to the check out.

Later, I examined the book more closely. The book was called Mother, Please Don’t Die. Which, of course, meant Mother was, in fact, going to die (but I wasn’t a savvy reader back then so I held out hope things would end well). The book followed a girl’s journey through her mother’s dying and her own grief as well as the difficult transition from being a little girl to being a teenager. Megan made sense of her mom’s worsening symptoms as best she could as a young girl; she told me about the terrible pressure and the anger bubbled to the surface at baseball practice, resulting in her consequent suspension. After her sister’s wedding, Megan sat with her mother and they had the first truly frank conversation about death that I had ever read; Mother was not going to be there for Megan’s wedding. She was dying.

And when she did die, my heart was shattered and I sobbed out loud. I’ve been reading and sobbing ever since. I developed a voracious appetite for the dying genre. Through my middle and high school years, I learned about living with diabetes, juvenile arthritis, kidney failure, and AIDs. I felt enlightened with each page. I groped for all the empathetic artifacts in the words that were written. I began to live with all of these hardships. I felt I knew what it was like.

The year before, 1986, had been a bad year. In January, my grandfather died of lung cancer. It was the first death I’d experienced. It was scary flying from North Carolina to Arkansas, only to see a dead body, dressed in blue and not breathing in a wooden bed. Two weeks later, I sat forward with the rest of my class, eyes glued to the television as the Challenger exploded and everyone on board was killed. They sent school counselors around to speak to us about dying and grief. I felt terrible for the teacher on the Challenger, but I cried terrible, painful tears for my grandfather.

Weeks later, I randomly asked my mother if she had had any other children before my brother and me one night before our bath. She hesitated and told us she had given birth to a little girl when she had been previously married, but the girl had died when she was a toddler from cancer. I nodded and soon forgot about it, as children will. It wasn’t long before my subconscious mind kicked in and I began to wonder if I had cancer, too, and asked my mother if I was going to die. Months I asked her and for months I must have drove a stake in her heart.

Little girls don’t understand these sorts of things. I didn’t. By the time I held a copy of Mother, Please Don’t Die in my hands, I needed to read about grief. The only problem is I never stopped grieving. The reading and the grieving is a question of insignificance; no matter if the chicken came before the egg, the chicken and the egg exist.

When I was eighteen, a very receptive former teacher gave me Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt as a graduation gift. Since then, it’s the real stories of laughter and pain that have touched me the most. Into Thin Air. Devil’s Knot. Young Men and Fire. Books about the Holocaust, 9/11, surviving freak accidents, OCD, alcoholism, depression. The stories are compelling but they are most important to me as conduits for processing my own life (and grief).

In a nutshell, I read books that are too sad for other people. A book is deemed good if I cry. It is deemed brilliant if I can still sob thinking about it a year later. There are many brilliant writers out there.

Right now, The Dark Tower: the Gunslinger is impatiently waiting on my bedside stand for me to finish it. The sojourn will be short and I will soon return to form. Stacked in the corner are my standard fair, books about the Taliban, mental illness, murder, the Mormon lifestyle…all await me. I can only think greedily of the sobs I am soon to cry.

I can’t help but think I’ve made Lurlene proud.

Am I going to kill my mother? My Aunt Ty died. Now, two other aunts on that same side of the family have cancer. These three aunts have at least one thing in common: they always swore that there’d been a mistake and I was their daughter. My aunts soon to be dead or already so. And I wonder, if I’ve killed my other mothers, am I going to kill my own mother.

RoMedicated Lady has decided she needs a dog. Although she was sure 2 labs would make the perfect pets, she decided that perhaps two dogs as big as she is was not necessarily a good thing.

ML has spent days looking for a doggy at various shelters. She thinks it’s fine if other people want to pay for certain breeds but she personally thinks the money should go toward adopting them and for supporting the rescue organization. Plus, these dogs can be in these places for years.

ML has decided she wants a Beagle named Rosie. She doesn’t love the name but she doesn’t hate it either. Bryan says it would be too traumatic to change it because she’s an adult dog. Medicated Lady wonders if she can nickname her “Ro.” She does not know why this name seems better than Rosie but somehow it does.

Ro is supposed to be a calm dog and she’s a little thing. Although there’s a bit of fear for her mental health but ML can offer love and extreme emotional responses to both minute and grand-scale trauma/drama.

Bryan and another friend say she is adorable. They say she is perfection. ML can’t help but agree.

So the only impulsive behavior ML feels is to just go and adopt her as soon as possible. Forget formalities.

I was called

mother today

and it felt right

not like the stick

in my arm

it was made

to sting, to ache, to burn, to bruise, to bubble, to burst

In a way

Neither of us can explain

My mother is cold

Not just to the touch

SOB with me

Blog Stats

  • 34,824 hits

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 49 other subscribers

EMAIL ME

at MedicatedLady@yahoo.com, loria29@gmail.com Or Facebook Me: www.facebook.com/loriataylor3

CopyScape

Page copy protected against web site content infringement by Copyscape