My Mother's Elegance

For those who raise us, devoted to truth and family, and stand firm in the embodiment of sustaining nurture.

The first written piece I ever published on the internet was titled “The Cool Parent,” it was also my college essay. I wrote about our family disturbance caused by my father’s alcoholism, and the strictness of my mother - paired with her beliefs during my adolescent years, I deemed her abhorrent. Oh how I was fooled.

While my dad was good, playful, and loving, his example as a partner and husband was anything but. This weight only proving she dig her heels into sturdiness further. I did not understand this at the time. I was drawn to his casual nature - masking unattended wounds and disease. I will share pieces of it with you now:

“After lifting him up from the bathroom floor on that January evening, I looked into his blood-shot eyes and inhaled the odor of gin.  From that moment on I would never again call him Dad.  Because I had been away at boarding school, I returned home that January unaware of and unprepared for the changes that had been going on at home. I discovered my father was an alcoholic, and my mother was battling the emotional turmoil of our family crisis.        

The house I called home was torn down with the expectation that it would be rebuilt for sale.  My father, a builder, transformed our home into a "smart house." It had a ballroom, home theater, heated patio, three-car garage and many more luxuries, however, it had no memories or warmth.  It was no longer ours.  My father anticipated the house would sell right away, leaving him with a big profit. It didn’t.  We relocated to my grandfather’s basement. The rooms were cold and drafty. The lighting was gloomy, a nicotine color. It was a basement, not a home.

Entering Dover-Sherborn High School in mid January of my sophomore year was socially okay but academically challenging because of the radically different curriculum.  My grades suffered. My home life continued to unravel.  Rich, my alcoholic father, had become a diabetic, suffered from depression and was diagnosed with heart failure.  Sure, he had a lot on his plate; however, it was no excuse for him to check out from our family. He was no longer a father figure.  He contributed nothing.  He didn’t talk.  He drank until he passed out in his truck. I grew up painfully and quickly, in the middle of a situation over which I had no control.

After the school year ended, Rich was in the hospital for intensive care and my mother decided we needed a healthier place to live. So my brother, my mother and I moved into in a one-bedroom apartment.  I slept in the cramped living room on the couch for eight months, and my mother and brother shared the bedroom.  Because she refused to let him live with us, Rich moved to Cape Cod to live with his parents.

Everyone I’ve known and been brought up with has been taught to follow in his or her parents' footsteps.  I, however, have learned the opposite.”

I dream of seeing him again often. In the visions, he is youthful, sober, content, and carries a bag as if he is finally coming home. My body fills with restoration, the vacuum of sorrow, halts. Completion. I am a little girl. Life has not hardened yet. And then, I wake again. Grief is ongoing I have learned, yet so is overcoming. It is a valuable thing - to discover thought more, and mend it as you go.

So, to my grateful surprise, the one that didn’t leave, and all I could not see, is in fact, very cool.

And I now, too, meet the backbone of motherhood, because of her.

To carry on.