Childhood With My Mom

I was born and spent my childhood in a city less than 10 miles outside of Boston. My parents were married and I was all my mother ever wanted.  They divorced when I was 2 years old and I don’t remember them ever being together. As a child, I recalled my mom being this superhero that never failed, lied or was scared. She put me first and never did much but spend all her waking moments raising me and sticking to a stable routine, which truly is the best for children.  She didn’t work however, and so, we were lower middle class. We didn’t have a car and I have this memory of being maybe 5 years old and telling strangers at the bus stop that I counted to 100 already and the bus was still not there. But then again, being 5 years old I was unaware that there was even a different life than walking everywhere and counting the seconds until I gave up waiting on the bus to show up.

One day we came home from Johnsons’ Drug Store and there was a van parked outside our apartment building and my mom told me we were getting basic cable for Christmas that year. I did not even know what cable TV was. But I didn’t care that I didn’t know what cable TV was, this was just life and it was all I knew. I look back and see just how hard it was to raise a child on welfare and be able to get cable TV. Even as a smoker, which isn’t cheap when you live on welfare, my mom found the money to get me cable so I could watch the Disney Channel.

When my mom lost her dad in January of 1995 I was 7 years old and our lives were never the same. My mom needed her dad like oxygen and he was what she lived for. I have often asked myself why I wasn’t enough to live for. I try not to dwell on that and now that I have a child, I can’t imagine letting anything other than him be what I live and breath for.  I guess I could stretch it and imagine that I was what she lived for after he died, and that maybe she would have died right along with him if it weren’t for me.  

I remember the morning the phone rang. It was just after 9:00 a.m. and it was the weekend because I would have been in school otherwise. I answered the phone and a man asked for my mother. After I handed her the phone and a few seconds went by she absolutely lost her mind on her bedroom floor.  I have never seen another person other than myself in later years collapse and lose it like that in my life. She called her brother and in between trying to gasp for air all she could say was “Dad. Just. Died.”. It turned out that he had a blood clot form in his leg from too much bed-rest in the hospital and it went to his heart and he had a heart attack that morning.  

I wasn’t allowed to see my grandfather much the last year or so of his life because my mom thought all the tubes in him at the hospital would scare me.  She was probably right but I guess I will never know. I also was not allowed at the funeral, maybe because of my age.  After a while, my mother began to lose weight and she was not the same person. The depression overcame her and even though she was still "mom-like", I can see in retrospect that she was forever changed. Life was less worth living but she pushed along because I’m guessing the thought of my dad raising me scared the s**t out of her. After some years went by she would say when she was upset that she could not wait until she could die just to be with her father again.  

I don’t want to leave the impression that life with my mother was this horrible, depressing era and I was neglected and left alone to cook my own toast and run my own bath while my mom cried in her bed all day. She was still a mom and I still loved her as much then as ever. She never let on the extent of the pain she was suffering. It was not until I was older and lost some of the most important people in my life that I realized just what she faced.

Author's Note

Sometimes I write about my mom when I am missing her.