I Remember Mama

This is a little bit of prose I wrote a couple years ago when remembering my Mother on Memorial Day

I Remember Mama............

My Mother died on Memorial Day.........35 years ago....penniless, alone, strangling on her own blood and regret.
Her life was so limited by her resentments, her self doubt and her alcoholism. Whatever potential she had to affect her world in a positive way was eroded by the sublimation of her true personality to the personas of doubt, and anger, jealousy, greed and fear, and overwhelming grief for a child she had lost.
My Mother was sunny and warm, kind and generous, and very wounded, a child like woman, who never grew up, never became self sufficient, never was really free. She metamorphosed over the years into all of her fine qualities opposites......the antithesis of who she really was..........i lost my mother to the consumption of her daily intake of bourbon and rage.
SHe certainly didn't have all the avenues to pursue on her journey of self revealing and exposing that we have today. Therapy was not something just about everyone did, alcoholics were like her friend who lay in her own vomit and feces on regular intervals, until her family locked her up to dry out and send her back home to play the organ chimes at church again on sundays. THere wern't shelves of self help books, or faceless "friends" on a pc to share her sorrow...no one to escort her to the threshold of mental health and self mastery. Self discovery was a lonely journey back then. TOday its fashionable to share each others disrobing and dismantling and putting back together...but then it was a private construction done in the deep of night in secret on the darker side of the moon, where you told no one save maybe the man you saw in that huge opulence dangling from Heaven in the night. It was a silent mending done in shame ....and it was simply easier to just have another drink....and read the bible. My Mother was famous for saying "Jesus is the only Psychiatrist I need."...along with "God won't let me lose my house"...as they put her belongings on the street, taking them from the cupboards my Daddy had built with his hands, from the only home I had ever known....they placed her there beside them...somehow God had let her lose her house. I think it had something to do with the fact that she was unable to get a job and pay the $127. a month house payment.
Life has been much easier for me. I suspect I was buried even deeper than my mother, but there were hands and there were words, and I did years of work to unearth me...to discover my authenticity and somehow I found the voice that was taken from me, and my fingers sang my song with the ink of my tears until i unraveled the umbilicus of grief and cut myself free...giving birth at long last to the person I was meant to be....and I found her wandering there too...the little girl I had been who loved her Mommy even then, and I took her hand, and became her friend.

Reviews

[ShadowWolf]

Remembering can be both sad and beautiful; you have captured both with this.

[lady o]

oh my dearest this has made me cry... beautiful writing. I feel this deeply.... hearts to you...

XX