I have been on a blog lull for a while now as some family issues have been taking up a lot of my think time. My mom is dying, but she has been dying for a long time, ever since I can remember. I recently read a fellow blogger’s tale of her visit to her parents house. It brought back memories of the same negative shit I grew up with. Nothing was ever good enough, right enough, it was like talking into a void when I had something to say. I grew up attending a Catholic school. I still get angry at the time when I told my mom that a priest had fondled me, and all she could do was deny that fact. It happened to me mom! All she could say was “no way, that is a man of God and you will be punished for what you are saying”. What the fuck? I always thought a parents responsibility was for the safety and well-being of their child, maybe in the perfect world. My parents were divorced when I was very young, and of course I ended up living with mom.
To this day I think that perhaps she just did not know any better. She obviously had a not so perfect childhood herself. One of eight children, growing up in poverty, having to quit school in the fourth grade then going to work to help support her younger siblings. To this day she maintains the same negative state of mind she has had all my life. I keep thinking that the reason she has lived so long is because she has still not learned what she was put here on earth to learn. She will be ninety three in a couple of weeks (she had me very late in life), still lives by herself, and though I call her every day, the negativity is still there.
“Ma, how’s it going?” “Oh, you know, the same, too much humidity, the sun is out, too hot, too many leaves on the ground, they should cut the tree down”. And so go typical conversations. I have gotten used to the repetitions and miss-aligned thoughts that come from getting older. But the negativity has remained in all our conversations. So I keep calling her every day, and I’m always hoping that for one day there might be a little ray of sun in her words.
Needless to say I learned what not to do in raising a child and my son has grown to be quite an impressive man, and what he carries inside is every positive thing I have been able to instill in him.
By the way, I did find out that the priest that had fondled me was sent to Africa to serve as a missionary in some small mission in the bush. He was mauled by a lion. Now that is Karma.
