Gratitude 63

Wow, Gentle Reader, I'm grateful now sixty-three times over.  This has become such an easy way to blog, I could go on like this, well, forever.  Why?  There is something invigorating about gratitude, or in this case, about bending my perspective just a little bit so that a positive spin can be put even on the most dismal and depressing news. 

Today is Mother's Day, and I am grateful for my mother.  I spent this morning with my birthday twin.  We are not related by blood but we were both born on Leap Year Day in 1956, here in Vancouver and, I would imagine, in the same hospital.  I will have to ask him about this.  Both our mothers have passed on and we spent part of the visit memorializing our mothers.  I did feel a bit disappointed in myself, and in my own mother.  Why?  Because I could only think of her best ever advice to me in the words "Don't ever let anyone shit on you!"  My fondest memory of my mother?  This happened when I was ten or eleven years old.  My father, a commercial fisherman during the summers and an auto collision repairman the rest of the year, was gone for the summer on his boat, my young adolescent brother was away with him, and peace reigned in our household.  I was no longer getting beat up by my brother.  He was gone for two months.  I was no longer being verbally, emotionally or sexually abused by my father.  He was away fishing, adding to our household income and leaving us in peace.

I say "us" because Mom seemed incredibly calm and happy while the other two males of the house were away.  I know that her relationship with my rebellious, high-strung and violent brother was often tense and difficult, neither was her marriage to my alcoholic and philandering father a match made in heaven.  With both those difficult people gone, Mom became gentle and enjoyable to be with.  She never hit me during those times.  When Dad and Rick were around throughout the fall, winter and spring, I was a regular target of her frequent beatings, when my brother wasn't punching me out, and my father picking up the slack with his own style of abuse.  For two glorious months, I was not a battered child.  Mom and I were friends.  We would go for long walks together by the river, and sometimes we would go out for Chinese food.

That is my best memory of  Mom.  She was not a heroic parent, though she did her best.  She has been dead now for twenty-six years, from lung cancer.  My own adult trajectory has been difficult and full of challenges, since I am a childhood trauma survivor.  I have almost always lived in poverty.  But now, though alone, I am for the first time in my life truly content.  And happy.  Now, I have everything I need, even if I don`t have a family.  I miss her sometimes.  We did become friends.  And now, my body no longer remembers the beatings.