Memories of mom.
Is it safe to say I wasn’t always a big fan of Mom? In our family she was the one who said no. No we couldn’t turn the bathroom into a make believe castle. No we couldn’t blast The Beach Boys and use the couch as our surfboard. No we couldn’t eat dessert if we hadn’t finished our dinner. No. No. No. No. No.
What were we allowed to do you ask?
We were allowed to be quiet. We were allowed to color and read and sing hymns. Quietly. We were allowed to get along and be nice. We were allowed to clean our rooms and we were allowed to follow the rules.
But when Dad was in charge…everything changed. Dad was Mr. Yes Man. Dad didn’t know the rules. Dad came home from work and hugged Mom and tickled us and played his music and told his jokes. Discipline from Dad was serious business because it happened so rarely.
Secretly I wanted my Dad to marry Misty’s mom. Misty’s mom had a high pitched voice and let us make play dough from SCRATCH and called her kids Ladybug and Chuck. If she married my Dad everything would be rainbows and kittens and SUGAR. And I would have a sweet nickname.
I remember one night after Dad died I was taking a bath. Contemplating how very screwed I was to only have the “no” person left to rule the roost. Why did it have to be this way?
Mom came in to wash my hair and dry me off and I decided it was a great time to trick her with a very tricky question. I needed to be relieved of the guilt.
“Mom? Sometimes…when someone’s Mom or Dad dies…is it bad if that person kind of wishes it were the other one and not the one that died?”
She smiled quietly. No flicker of hurt in her eyes. No shadow of resentment cast. Just a tilt of the head and a trace of sympathy.
“Do you sometimes wish Dad was here taking care of you and I was the one in heaven?”
I had been trying to be vague, but she cut right to the chase. A big question nonetheless. I shook my head yes with a look that prayed I wasn’t hurting her feelings. Or making her mad.
“Wishing Dad were here is very normal Kathy. We all miss him. We all want him home. It’s okay.”
It’s okay. I wished her dead and it was okay. Spoken like a true Mother.
Here was a woman suffering the loss of her first great love. A woman shouldering the burden of yard work and finances and the care of six young children. A woman who’s devotion and love and work went highly unnoticed and unappreciated by her ungrateful seven year old daughter in the bathtub because she wasn’t allowed to use the couch as a surfboard. And yet here she was reassuring me.
It was okay.
Awesome.
And you know what is even more awesome? It’s that she doesn’t even remember the conversation. My words were not only not hurtful to her…they didn’t even lend themselves as something worth remembering. I didn’t even kind of hurt her feelings.
Maybe she didn’t realize how serious I was.