My Mother

Tonight, I sat on my back porch listening to my dogs bark at nothing (I hope) and realized I have basically written NOTHING about my parents.

My mother, a strong woman, a reader, a scholar, a former biology teacher has recently really come through for me. Although she is much closer to my sister, her support has been important this last week. I always knew we had this "wedge" between us that I cannot quite define. I have my ideas and theories about WHY it's there but I will not articulate it here.

Let us just say that all the things that drove me CRAZY about her growing up, I now find myself doing. Things like cleaning up the house on the way OUT when I'm late going somewhere, talking to strangers in a grocery line, and not SITTING down to a meal because I'm way too busy taking care of others...must be genetic passings because I DO THIS NOW.

She does have a whacked sense of humor much like mine but not nearly as extreme. Her birthday before last, ten of us pressed around the table celebrating her seventy second year of life...joy....presents....cake...and candles, she stopped the celebration and said, "I just thought I should let you all know that I have Stage One Cancer of the Uterus. It's okay, they caught it early."

You can only IMAGINE how stunned, distraught and concerned we all were. And in my FUCKED UP brain, I thought, "Does this mean we can't have cake?" I called her later to tell her how I diffused THE OVERWHELMING FEAR and TERROR in my mind and she laughed her ass off. This year, at her party, I repeated my story and she laughed again, free of her Uterus and THANK GOD...her Cancer.

Signing Off,

Much Like Mom, The Angry Lesbian
08/03/2006