I have been lost a while, in the silence of my mind. It’s the place I go when I
am unable to make heads or tails of my feelings, my emotions, my thoughts, my
life. It’s the place I go when my life doesn’t make any sense.
It seems that almost nothing
can bring me out of the silence. I wander there. I never make my way out of it
on my own. I always need help. I always need someone to save me. And as luck
would have it, I got salvation.
Today. On Mother’s Day.
It didn’t come from my Mommie
either. Though she usually finds me when I’m lost. It came from a child. My child.
My baby girl who spent no time in my uterus. This morning, I awoke to a text
message from her which simply read: Happy Mother’s Day Mommy!! :)
I have gotten that text
message from her every Mother’s Day for the past 6 years or so. I smiled and
rolled over. Attempting to get a few more zzzz’s before getting ready for
Church.
While at Church, we all took a
moment to greet each other. Introduce ourselves, shake hands, and love on each
other a spell before the message. I reached out to an elderly black woman a row
behind me. A woman who’s birthed generations of greatness, I’m sure. I'm absolutely positive.
Me: *smiling*
Happy
Mother’s Day Ma’am!
Her: Thank you. Are you a mother?
Me: *humbly shaking my head* No ma’am, I’m not.
Her: Well, *pause* I’m sure you’ve mothered somebody’s baby. Happy Mother’s Day to you too.
And if I didn’t have that text
message in my phone, I would have said, Well,
I don’t know that I’ve done any of that. Because some of us never
really know what we have actually done until someone sends you an unexpected
message telling you exactly what you have done.
Then I remembered about that
one time, when I attempted to write something that was like a book. And the
life I wrote about. And the people in that life. And my baby girl was there
waiting for me to remember her.
Of all my babies, she was
the most naive, so I protected her like any mother fearing the dangers in the
wilderness would do. I protected her from my mistakes, cleaned up after hers
and openly and outwardly loved her. She had CM’s heart, AD’s attitude, MP’s
reservation, and KF’s cluelessness. Milly
made me think of my girls often. Mostly because anytime I said something to AD
about her, AD reminded me that I only had 4 children. But they never needed me
like she did.
And like all my girls, she
longed for a father. So this made any man, anywhere, a potential suitor. Milly
already picked her pony in this race though. And she, never having met “that
guy”, was prepared to go all in. I was ready to let him go while she kept
heating the embers left in the ashes.
She fought that fight
alone and in vain. There is no telling really, the life she planned for me and “that
guy”, but it included her – even the wedding. She would have been fine being a
flower girl. Milly was all the way in that life and that is what mattered to
her. While I was in Tennessee I obliged her innocence with my ignorance. What
was a broken heart anyway? Wasn’t the first. Wouldn’t be the last. It was going
to be broken eventually? Right? Riiiight…
Milly guarded my heart
like a watchdog. I rarely, if ever, let her see me cry. Anyone really, but her
especially. It was too much and she was far too young to recover from it. She
needed to believe in love, a mother’s love and an intimate love, so I had to
hold on to a few things that weren’t real. I also had to show her a few things
that were. Because when you love someone, you have to be unselfish enough to
give them what they want.
Daddy TWP. Somehow, my best friend became Daddy TWP. What were the qualifications you ask? He was
(is) handsome. Milly was certain of many things – like the fact that there was something
going on (or had went on) between TWP and I, and we just didn’t talk about it.
She wasn’t the first to believe this. She won’t be the last.
Our friendship, or
relationship, or the *ship* we are on or were on at the time was estranged by
the National Football League. He was busy living his dream while I was bored losing
mine. I missed my friend. I needed my friend. So I decided to scrapbook my very
best friend.
Old photos, laughs,
memories, and other things that he and I would understand, a story succinctly told
in 50 or so pages.
ooooooo Mama, what’cha doing? I wanna do it! Milly’s voice was always full of curiosity and excitement. She
didn’t have to announce herself anymore, she had the spare key.
I’m making a
scrapbook. Not sure I even looked
up from the kitchen table.
Who is this cutie? Hmph, he’s fine!
That’s my cousin. Smiling, each picture was such a found memory.
He’s still fine.
…and that’s SDP
and that right there is TWP. My
three men.
TWP? What he do? Where he live? Is this your boo?
Oh yea, he can get it! Milly’s reactions
to attractive men were fairly scripted. The questions are sometimes asked in a
different order, but they always end with, Oh yea,
he can get it!
Wow! Um, no, that’s
my best friend. He plays football and he’s going to get this scrapbook. A decision I made right then, in that statement.
Still stuck on the “um, no”
Milly couldn’t get any further, ...you ain’t never did
nothing with him? You should…hmph, this my new daddy since you don’t know who
my real one is… Oh yea, Daddy TWP.
For weeks she watched me
cut, paste, copy, print, do, re-do, match, tell and re-tell days of old. When I
was a different me in a very different world. Milly listened more attentively
to those stories than any of her classes. She could recite them like old family
memories. I wish she would have paid more attention to those classes though.
But I knew she loved them – the stories. Hell, I loved telling her. For no
other reason than to remember people who made my life something special. I
never thanked UCLA for bringing us all into the same space, so that we could be
all the things that we were to each other. Westwood was a wonderful host. I
suppose as long as I keep paying Direct Loan Servicing Center, I’ll always be
saying a special monthly “thank you”.
By the time I finished (or
gave up because I couldn’t add any more pages) she understood. Just like CM.
Love isn’t anything but love. It’s not self serving, or lustful or any of those
things you see in romantic comedies – it’s not even all that funny. The biggest
sacrifice you make is loving someone else. It will be easy to do because that’s
the nature of love, but it will require your everything – the hard part. It
doesn’t feel space or time or distance or anything but itself. There is no
explanation (which baffles the scientist in me) for it. It is exactly all that
it is, and that is enough.
Milly flipped through each
page, sad to see it go, impressed with my attention to detail, confused by some
of the messages, curious about the inside jokes, but certain that TWP and I
could love each other and that be it. Though, I know, she hopes for the “Harry
Met Sally” ending. I can feel it.
Milly would leave MTSU for
Atlanta, Georgia. One of two things about Atlanta that would break my heart. As
much as I didn’t want her to leave Murfreesboro, I know that my sin, leaving
her, would come with a great consequence. And though I didn’t make that
decision for her, she is my child and I should have set a better example for
her. It wasn’t time for me to go. And neither was it for her. But I understood.
Any parent worth their chops know that some lessons have to be lived to be
learned.
…and learned to be understood.
And just like that, I’m back.
Back to my purpose in life. #writing #mothering #godmothering
#GapFilling&Shopping #seewhatIdidthere
No comments:
Post a Comment