Dear Mom,
I know that I am typing you this letter a little early and a little late. Tomorrow is Thankful Thursday so I will be busy listing more items in which I'm Thankful to God for tomorrow. And of course you are one of them again.
Tomorrow you would have been 64 years old. It is amazing to me that with all you went through in life, that you never aged. So I will always remember you as that beautiful mom that you were when you gave birth to me. That was the mom that I loved. The healthy mom with the beautiful smile and such wonderful taste in fashion with yourself and your children but also such a wonderful homemaker and wife. The healthy mom that you were is what I like to force myself to go back and remember.
It was hard for me to do for a long time, because your illness started corroding our lives at such a young age for you and after only 11 years married to Daddy at the time. Eleven years seems like such a short time to have your dreams interrupted. Your dream of being that homemaker and wife. It amazes me now as a grown woman struggling with balancing staying home with raising one son, let alone 3 children. I don't know how you did it.
I know that in hindsight I can look back at a lot of things that I never understood growing up. I was a troubled child due to your illness that we never found out about until 1991. So from the time the mental onset began when I was 7 or 8 years old, until 1991, I had no name for it.
All I knew was that my home was suddenly becoming this place where I had to be the one to be there for Daddy, J and P who was only less than 5 at the time when the illness was hitting the hardest. We suffered through many atrocities with him being the sole provider including losing heat, hot water, electricity and eventually our home to Daddy eventually losing another home, all because of ignorance. Ignorance on the part of every adult who witnessed what was going on and who didn't step in or didn't help or who eventually found out years later about the illness and still didn't help.
The child in me is angry now, as the mom and woman in me remembers each heartbreak that you and we suffered due to "an illness". I'm angry at the counselors in school, the friends and family that turned their back, due to Daddy's lack of housecleaning instead of looking at what he was struggling with. I'm angry at the people who witnessed us every day deteriorate and did not step in. I don't know if it would have helped anyway because their still is no cure for what you suffered with, but regarding maybe some help for Daddy going through what he did.
I've been through counseling and I know that the child within me is allowed to "hate" that part of my life. I'm allowed to hate that part of what I went through as a child with you deteriorating. I'm also allowed to "love" that part of you due to you had no control over what was happening. I'm allowed to love you as my mother.
Now though as a mom, it is hard. I look in the mirror and there you are. Today I grabbed some old bobby pins that I never use to pull the strands of my hair back by my ponytail and they were your bobby pins that used to hold in your hair around your bun. Matthew asked me what they were because I never where them.
The other day I remembered how you used to where your hair in rollers taking us to McCrory's and I remembered being the teenager I was, how embarrassed and how much I used to let you know how much you embarrassed me.
I know once I found out about your illness and many years of counseling that normal teenage years were going to happen regardless, but I know that if I knew what you were facing I would have been the better daughter and your friend.
I know that when you were in the nursing home I told you how sorry I was for everything I ever did, the arguments we had that really escalated as you got worse and before I moved to MA. I later apologized for being so far away and that was and still is the most torturous for me to think that when you were there every day in that room, I wasn't holding your hand.
It almost caused me to leave MA for good when I couldn't leave the state one time, returning home from visiting you. I know God was with me though when I did, it was only a few months later that I was pregnant with Matthew and that the road I had chosen was the right one.
I'm sorry I'm writing you this letter now when tomorrow would have been a celebratory day for you. It just seems to pour out and I know you know, how I feel regardless. I know you are here with me and that you see your Grandson and that you would run to him and squeeze him all of the time if you could. I hope you saw him the other day planning out different ingredients for an idea he had to bake. I know you would get a kick out of that. I'm always telling him how much Grandma was always coming up with new things to make by using her creativity with what little she had. I know you would get a kick out of him when he gets filthy from playing and I tell him he is a little "coalminers grandson".
Well, my hands are frozen now and I can't keep typing so I will let you know more in my prayers.
I love you and I hope you have a pint of Genesee with Uncle M and Grandma & Grandpa tomorrow celebrating the day they gave you life.
Without your life, Matthew's life wouldn't be.
I love you Mom. Happy Birthday.
Love
TM
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