I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.

                                    My crazy/beautiful family last Christmas

My father said he no longer wanted a grandson as we ate dinner at Red Kimono over at Technohub for his birthday. "He's gonna turn gay with all of you girls around." We laughed and reassured him that that wouldn't happen... but I could tell, from the way his forehead wrinkled... he wasn't kidding.

I just think he feels he's got it good to have so many pretty girls being sweet to him all the time... and a boy would just annoy the living bejeezus out of him, hahaha!

But I'm not going to talk about my father today.

.....

While it was my father who celebrated his birthday the other day... it was my mother who gave us [my sisters and I] a celebration.

And I learned that it's never too late... to understand your mother (to forgive them, optional).

In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.

And I learned that my dad was an ass to her when they first got together (sorry dad) and that it was her mother-in-law (of all people, God rest her soul) who kept her strong and steady.

The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. 'You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine.

And I learned --as she finally cared to admit-- that despite her own marital problems, when she sees how successful my sisters and I have become, she feels blessed, that all of it (and I mean all of the crazy shit we had to endure and felt we were being punished for because we never got it, never got her, and why she kept it all bottled in because she was either too insecure or too proud to show any sign of weakness) was worth it, was worth the trouble, that her pain and sacrifice had paid off, knowing that their union (albeit turbulent and completely insane) was able to give us a life worth coveting.

Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face, on a November day in the rain.

And I learned... despite our occasional "estrangement" and our constant head-butting and incessant disowning.. that she was always so proud of me for being strong enough to be on my own when it was necessary, whether it was to become a scholar at UPLB or to become a single mom.

I liked it when my mother tried to teach me things, when she paid attention. So often when I was with her, she was unreachable. Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.


And I learned...

Nay...

Reaffirmed...

That while it was our father who gave us the smarts and the sensibilities (and yes, even the financial benefits)... it was our mother who gave us the strength and the courage to be strong. And even though she's galaxies away from perfect and even if I don't agree with how she lives sometimes, I don't think we could've asked for a better mother... at least, a mother better equipped to raise the kind of women my sisters and I are today.

They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, mothers who would fight for us, who would kill for us, and die for us.



And I learned... as I rode in the car with her as my two younger sisters convoyed on over to hit up our next drinking spot... that my mother won her very first singing contest some 30 years ago by singing "Islands in the Stream," she reminisced as the song came on in the car.




***Quotes taken from Janet Fitch's White Oleander