Jen's (Part 8) 'Gft 44'

Gft44

I woke up at 3am to my daughter who needed a hug and some reassurance in the middle of the night before returning back to her bed. Then I lay there, unable to go back to sleep but wanting to go back to sleep so much. Wishing I could, but I kept tossing and turning. Finally, I got up out of frustration over not sleeping and having a spouse who is sound asleep next to you. Part of me wanted to swing my arm over and wallop him for being able to sleep and me being wide awake. This is not the first time this has happened. It has been like a tea kettle that gets hotter and hotter and just ready to explode! It is quite often that I go up to bed first and then later in the night my husband sneaks into bed. Sometimes, in the middle of the night I will wake to a child needing a hug, put back to bed, or a drink of water. When I do get back to bed I find that I can’t fall back to sleep. So, I lay there listening to the sound of his heavy breathing and occasional snoring in sheer frustration over my sleeplessness. So, I finally get up! I come downstairs and get on my laptop computer to sit and do only what I know to do, write. In my half awakened state, I wonder inside my head, over and over again… “What am I going to write about, what am I going to write about, damn I wish I could sleep, this sucks! What am I going to write about? Do I have to write? Can’t I go back to sleep? Damn I wish I could sleep! What am I going to write about, oh this couch feels comfy enough to go to sleep on, but my mind is racing, I have stuff to say, and I can’t sleep! What am I going to write about?!” Then, I finally lean over my computer to turn on the light next to me and as I look back on my screen I find the words ‘Gft44’ on my screen. Wow, I am still writing about ‘Gft44’. More of my Mom stuff! The gift of 44. Now, looking back, I say wow what a gift, to be given something to write about so easily. At the same time, I have to tell you this has still been a tough week with all that I have been shedding about my past and my revelations with my mom. It is good to get this all out of my body and into the open but at the same time I find it tough to open my heart so deeply. As they say sometimes, “Love hurts”. (A song lyric comes to mind singing in my head)

So, I’m wondering, “Gft 44; what is the gift that my mom at age 44 was able to give me?” I already talked about how in the anniversary of her death and the synchronistic healing that my ‘new’ mom had here in Detroit last week I was able to see her life with new eyes and celebrate who my mom was and the vibrant woman she used to be. But I can’t help but think more of what life might have been like for her. What was she like? What did she ‘Gift’ me by leaving at 44 years old? I don’t have allot of beautiful memories of my mom before she became sick with colon cancer; just a few. Most of my memories are of her struggles in her relationship with my father. There always seemed to be a new drama unfolding at our house. It was either an argument about money or alcohol. My mom worked diligently because my dad never had a steady job. She would tirelessly go to work in the morning and come home at night to take care of the home and her children. I always remember having a meal on the table and it always being prepared by my mom. I never remember my mom drinking alcohol. It was only my dad. I remember arguments. There were arguments between my mom and dad about bills, and alcohol. Mainly, because my dad would come home drunk because of his inability to cope with life. My mom would just break down out of sheer frustration and ‘let him have it’ for again being a failure. My dad would either crumble in despair like a scolded puppy dog or he would retaliate with his fists. No talking, just yelling, screaming, and hitting. They had a very bitter/sweet marriage. I have to imagine that when my parents met they were very much in love with each other. My mother used to talk of having many boyfriends. One of which was a Doctor, “We could have had a doctor for a daddy.” She used to tell us in front of MY daddy, just to piss him off and because she was disappointed in him. She said these things because she was so unhappy in her own marriage that she had to at least express what she thought she could have been and the life she could have had. Let’s face it; her current life of abuse was not her dream life. But she chose my dad. Why? Gosh, good question, I guess it was his good looks and gruff kind of charm. He was a very nice man who had a rough love to him. He never actually came over and embraced me or held my hand as a child. I just remember a wrestling kind of dad who just would laugh and push on your shoulder to make a connection. Everything was kind of shrugged off and the close personal hugs, kisses, and snuggles of daddy time were nonexistent. Every once in awhile he would pull you over and tell you how sorry he was for drinking and causing fights the night before and promise never to do it again. Besides the pushes on the shoulder, that was as personal as he would get.

I guess when I look back at my parents and the life they made, I can honestly say it was like living in a household of big kids raising little kids. The big people, who are supposed to be your parents and ‘know it all’ were raising the completely innocent ‘little people’. In many ways, I can relate to this today. Often, as a wife and a parent, I don’t know what the hell I am doing and even if I am doing the right thing in my marriage or with my children. I question my actions quite often out of fear that I might be making the same mistakes they did. When, all I can do, and the best that I can do, is to just live in the moment and live from my heart.

Sometimes, I look at my parents out of disbelief of the life that they led together. I mean really, what more could they do or what more did they know of? Surely, they, themselves, were still kids that grew up in battered homes and lived only the kind of life they had ever known life to be. My uncle, my mother’s brother, would tell me stories (when I was older) of how he lived in a house that was filled with yelling and screaming and abuse at times. That even my grandparents only knew how to communicate in this way. Thankfully, they were not influenced by alcohol and it was only the yelling and battered gene that they passed down to the next generation, (bad joke). I do not know much about my dad’s side of the family. He has never talked about any of the abuse that triggered the fighting and alcoholism gene in him but I know it is there. As a child, there was a time when I lived with my grandmother (my dad’s mother) just downstairs from us in our home. It was a perfect set up in my mother’s eyes. She moved in because of various reasons and being unable to live in NYC by herself anymore and my parents were assured that ‘someone’ would at least be home when their kids came home from school and they were at work. But, she was far from a grandmotherly type of person. Her way of babysitting, was pounding on the roof of her home with a broomstick (just downstairs) to get us to stop fighting or making so much noise. She would yell up to us to “Knock it off, and you kids just wait till your parents get home and I tell them how bad you have been!” Well, that was all my tired mom needed to hear or my intoxic dad needed to know at the end of his day. You can imagine the rest.

Anyway, my parents aimlessly, came together out of sheer passion. They were illusioned to believe they were going to have the American dream. But something never kept my family together. They were destined to fall apart. Plague and heartache was rampant and they did not have the tools to heal their life. So, you may still be wondering, “What was the Gift of 44?” In my mother’s short time she gifted me with the thought of what family could be, and can be about. Even though, her family did not work out to be exactly what she wanted it to be, she had an idea, and she wanted it desperately to work. I know that she tried her hardest and that what she did seemed to fail, and did fail, in the sense of what a family really should be about. If we consider for a moment, “How many of us actually ‘know’ what family is?” What is family? A family, to me, is a connection between people that have common interests and/or ideas about life. Family is what brings people together, closer together to live in a place of love, sharing, and peace. As humans, we have family everywhere. We can connect with each other on multiple ways that brings us all as close to each other as we allow. Through the gift of my family I have learned that I can create family any where I go and whoever I may come in contact with. My closest family is the family that I am creating with my children, but I have so many families as well. I have to admit, I am not very good at this ‘family idea’ all the time. I am trying, just like my mom, to break the cycle of generations of heartache so as not to pass it along to my own children. Quit often, I fail at this idea. I find myself slipping into old patterns, becoming upset about my slip ups, and then having to pick myself up and ‘start all over’ again. It is important though that I continue to take the steps to remember who I am and where many of my thoughts and beliefs came from. Talking about my past and journeying back helps me to see why I react and act the way I do in my own family. I don’t have my parents, so going deeper to remember in hopes of ‘knowing’ who I am and where I come from helps me understand why I instinctively do the things that I do. In knowing this, I am empowered to change and do things differently with my own new family today. My mom did the things she did, because she learned from her family how to do life that way. And why did she stay with a man such as my dad? Because she believed in family and that there could be a happily ever after. Unfortunately, that is not the way it turned out but at least I saw her try as hard as she could and never give up in a man that did not have it in him to heal before it was too late. But that is the way life is sometimes, right? Like the song says, “You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone, they put up a parking lot, oooo, da, da, da, da, oh and don’t always seem to go, you never know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” So, I guess he never knew and she never knew so now it is my turn to KNOW so that I know now what I’ve got and NOT when it’s gone. Thanks MOM, for Gift 44.