Five Years Ago and Forever

My mother always used to ask the same rhetorical question, "Why did I have children so young." She told us that she never regretted having us, she just wished she would have had me ten years later at 27 rather than 17. She also told me that everything happens for a reason, even though, at the time, we may not understand why. If my mother knew that she was only going to live to 49 years old, I wonder if she still would have asked that question.

She has been gone for five years now, and I've had five years come to grips with the beautiful memories of the woman I knew in childhood and the reality of who my mother really was.

My mother moved my sister and me out to Idaho before I started kindergarten. She said she did it, because she didn't think there was much of a future for us in our small Connecticut town. She was probably right about that. The family she took me away from who still reside in Connecticut don't have very nice things to say about my birthplace.

What I always took for a truth, and a wise decision was the first lie I learned about after she died. On a chilly night at my former home in the Northwest, my stepfather and I had a conversation, because I was dealing with a severe identity crisis. This is when he told me about my mother's motivation for moving West. She had gone to work at a local watering hole that happened to be owned by a guy who was connected, and I don't mean he was good at social networking. My mother always had a natural business acumen, so despite her community college education she ended up managing the club's finances. She told my stepfather that there was a raid on the club one night, she was arrested along with all of the other employees, and later released. At that moment she knew she had to pick up and leave.

From the age of five to age 12, we moved at least twice a year. We would have "sleep away nights" where we would go to some out-of-the-way motel in the middle of nowhere, get a bag of Cheetos and some Hershey's Kisses, and watch movies late into the night. When you're young, you take everything your parents say as law, and you don't question it at the time. Once my stepfather revealed that my mother spent several years on the run, all of the little nuances of abnormality surfaced, and I didn't know what about my past I could trust.

For the first year after my mother's death, I grieved her. For the next two years that followed, I would come to nearly hate her. I was angry at her, not for going on the run, but for separating me from my father with a web of lies. She spent most of my life telling me that my father didn't want me. This was the reason why he never sent birthday or holiday presents on time, and didn't call me on a regular basis. Once she was gone, and I had the conversation with my stepdad, I had a strong urge to reconnect with my father.

During one of our visits, we had a chance to talk about the past, and I asked him why he was never more involved in my life. He told me that during that stretch of my life where we moved twice a year, my mother would never tell him when we were moving or give him our new address. He used a local connection that he had at a state agency to find me, and would track me down every time. My mother would write to him, and tell him to go away, but he never would.

It is strange how this infuriating piece of news that my mother let me suffer emotionally in order to push my father away from me was also one of the happiest moments, because I found out that someone who I thought had abandoned me, had never given up on me.

During my teenage years and through my early 20s, my mother fought me on my ambitions to travel and work in the music industry. She said she didn't want me to turn out like my father who was unstable and shirked his responsibilities. What she really didn't want was for me to follow in her footsteps. She had a crazy wild streak, and had alienated herself from her family and friends through her thoughtless, selfish actions and behavior. Once she realized the consequences of her actions, she focused the rest of her life on creating the "perfect" family, having the "perfect" house, and constructing the "perfect" life. All the while forgetting, that there is no such thing as perfect, and even when you create the world in which everything is "perfect" it may be more prison than paradise.

Anger and hate settled into resentment. I took the picture of her down, and didn't speak of her. I wanted my mother to be nothing more than a memory that I was better off forgetting. I lit the candle of remembrance four years after her death more out of obligation than affection.

Forgiveness finally came to me through a dream. I was as I am today, but was back in the tiny house in my home town in Idaho. I came out of the bedroom that I shared with my sister, and walked into the country-themed living room decorated with the wallpaper Mom and I spent hours putting up late into a summer's night. I turned to walk into the kitchen and there she was, sitting at the table wearing her long, blue jean skirt, pink shirt, with her black hair hanging long in the hippie style she never abandoned. She was drinking bland, taupe-colored coffee out of a blue, gingham checkered mug featuring a cartoon duck wearing a bonnet. It was her favorite cup.

She asked me if I had my homework done, and I was speechless. I just walked up to her as fast as I could, wrapped my arms around her, and started crying, because I knew it was a dream and she was dead.

After that night I chose to remember my mother as the person I grew up with who was fun and loved to laugh. She never hesitated to help others, and was always someone that I could talk to about anything. I was glad she was by my side holding my hand when Rachael was born, and my heart ached terribly months later when I spent a lonely night in the hospital with my newborn, because she wasn't there.

Ultimately I chose to honor my mother's memory in Shayna's middle name, Michal. My mother might have told some devastating lies that had long term effects, but whether her demons were real or imagined, I hold on to the belief that my mother spent the better part of her life doing exactly what most mothers strive to do; their best.

My Bizarre Collection

My stepdad had a stamp and coin collection, my mother filled her shelves with English-style teapots, one of my sisters collects adorable frog figurines, the other has a wide assortment of Harry Potter t-shirts, my husband collects Hilton honors points (which I really love and benefit from), and as for me, I collect interesting human experiences.

It was no surprise that I gravitated to Mass Communications with an emphasis in Cultural Studies as my major of choice in college. Cultural Studies is a field which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media studies, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Basically, Cultural Studies helps explain why we do things the way we do, and how it fits into our society. Hence, my lifelong interest in collecting human experiences.

Some of my experiences have included sitting through a Mary Kay cosmetics sales and recruiting meeting, which seemed to put a lot of emphasis on socializing strictly for the purpose of selling makeup to supposedly "new friends", participating in a Native American sweat near Vancouver, British Columbia, where I sat around a very hot fire in a traditional tee-pee discussing my innermost thoughts to a group of strangers, while sweating like a pig. The upside came at the end of the two-hour sweat when I stepped out of the tee-pee and was doused by the tribal medicine carrier with a large bucket of cold water.

I've been a card-carrying member of both major political parties, and have attended their meetings. On the local and state level, both parties have good ideas and stand for something, unfortunately, as they start rising up to the national level the goodness evaporates and the void is filled by power hunger and monied lobbyists. I have encountered lesser known political parties during coffee with an ardent LaRouche Youth Movement activist, email correspondence with the head of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a shopping trip to the Revolutionary Communist bookstore in Seattle. Just as an FYI, the Communist bookstore doesn't take credit cards or checks.

After Rachael was born, I worried that submitting to a suburban "normal" lifestyle would lead to the end of my bizarre collection. After all, my belief was that you don't find anything interesting in the suburbs. Fortunately, I've discovered that one doesn't have to stop enjoying the peculiar just because the fates have chosen to put you in a life situation that June Cleaver would envy.

Since submitting to the suburb mom life, I have attended an Orthodox Jewish bris (ritual circumcision), which was an interesting pairing of an uncomfortable surgical procedure and fantastic buffet. I was a guest at a traditional Hindi housewarming celebration, which seemed a little uncomfortable at first, because both the man and woman of the house greeted us wearing silk sashes decorated with swastikas. Fortunately, my friend caught the look of concern in my eye and took the time to explain that Hitler totally jacked a beautiful, peaceful symbol of Indian culture and turned it into something evil. It's nice to know that Hindus hate him, too.

I have encountered a homophobic waitress at a Mongolian grill, hung out with two fabulous drag queens in hot pink, beehive wigs, met a famous Olympian at an enormous estate in Beverly Hills, and traveled to the much raved about Hamptons (for the record, I still don't see what's so great about that place).

Despite becoming a minivan-driving, soccer mom, I have no intention of ridding my life of my collection of interesting human experiences. In fact, I strive on a regular basis to continue collecting. The world is filled with bizarre humans, peculiar fringe groups, and situations that a truly normal person would find uncomfortable. I'll dive in with both feet, welcoming anything, except a Mac user group, because next to Scientologists, people who are militant Mac users make up the largest, nutjob cult in America, hands down.