Recently, I graduated from college and was told by an enormous amount of people about how proud my Mother would be of me. It stung on the surface, but I never could understand why. I had completed the plan, the mission to get me through college and while she had lied to me, to get me there, I was finally done. But, what if you she wouldn't be proud of me? What if she would have been disappointed that I almost considered dropping out twice and that I cursed her daily for leaving me to be the lady of the house? Would she be proud that sometimes I forgot a load of laundry in the washer for a week or that I finally learned how to cook, but I still couldn't figure out how in the hell to fry bacon? It led to the fact that we hadn't always been friends and I questioned whether or not she would be, even though she wasn't there to argue with me for once in my life.
We never got along as I grew up, we were too much alike to form a real bond with one another. I was never her perfect daughter, more interested in black clothing and horrible rock bands, unlike my spunky, preppy cousins that were going to nursing school or becoming Engineers. I was angry and depressed because I was being repressed by someone that was supposed to love me for me.
On top of all that anger, I had spent a huge chunk of my teenage years being pissed off at her because my best friend had died and I felt like she was the perfect person to blame. She never deserved that blame, though. She was just being a Mother, a loving person to her only daughter, insisting that my friend stay at school and go home with her sister instead. That night that she died, my mom came home from her night out early and laid in bed with me. I remember crying, asking her why it had happened. Bluntly, she told me that it was just her time to go and that nothing would have changed that. But what if? What if she would have came home with us instead of driving around on backroads with her sister? Would she still be here with us or would we have been in a deadly car crash instead? As time went on, I let the blame fade away and I realized that God was cruel instead. It was like my Mom tried to make it up to me then, making sure that I couldn't blame her for anything else.
It took my brother going away to prison and my Dad working nights for us to finally deal with each other. At first, it was Hell. She wanted to know everything about me and wanted to know why I was so reserved with her, especially since I had never been like that with anyone else. Suddenly, she wanted to spend all this time with me and wanted me to be friends with her instead. I grew to enjoy it, sometimes more than anything else I had in life. We could be honest with each other, never holding anything back. I could ask her about life and sex and she would counter with questions about whether or not that song "Whistle" was really about blowjobs or not. I'd cry because I was laughing so hard at her jokes or would simply text her because she was my best friend and needed to know how pissed I was that I was stuck at work for another four hours. She finally got me and I finally wasn't depressed for the first time in my life.
Then, I got accepted into University. She was so proud of me and wanted everyone to know that her little girl was going to become a teacher. Time flew by and as I entered my last year there, we received news that still makes me want to throw up when I think about it. That April, she had broke her ribs throwing up and couldn't figure out what was taking them so long to heal. Her doctor reassured her that it was nothing, just to take it easy for once and let them heal. Finally, in July, she discovered a weird bump in her arm that ended up being taken out by a crazy physician in his office. He sent the biopsy to a Cancer Center and the results came back positive. My Mom had lung cancer. That's all we knew or at least, that was all she was willing to tell us. She told me one evening that it was literally so small, that they assured her that Chemo would make it go away and while it did, she never opened up that it had gone to her bones too. She didn't want to make us worry because that's what my Mom did, she took care of everything on her own.
That August, she forced me to go to back to school and assured me that she was going to be fine, the Doctor had even promised her that she would be at my Graduation as long as she did everything that he asked her to. So, she did, but in September, she called me and begged me to let her stop Chemo and I called her selfish. I remember being so angry at her because how dare she give up this easily, even though I didn't know how bad it was and that the Chemo was just painfully dragging on her Death March. I would come home every weekend and I would see my Mom becoming less of a person, which honestly scared the hell out of me. It got to the points where I just went to school because she asked me to and I would run back home with my tail between my legs as soon as Friday hit because I felt guilty for not staying with her. Finally, in October, my brother came to see me at school and told me about how odd my Mom had been acting. She would sleep all the time and then would wake up, sprouting out weird stories or saying strange phrases. We were convinced that she was abusing her pain pills that the Doctor had given her and my Brother wanted me to come home for an intervention. I didn't make it home in time the next day, she ended up begging my Dad to take her to hospital because she knew something was wrong.
We spent a week in the Hospital and I was so confused, how had this curable Lung Cancer done this to her? I spent a large amount of time babysitting her, scared to leave her because being away at college had somehow made me miss something. My Mom went from babbling invalid to herself, demanding Twinkies and Lion's Choice for meals over the shitty hospital food that they were trying to give her. The third day we were there, we had a Doctor come in to see her that told me I would be lucky if she made it to Thanksgiving, even though she told him to shut up and that she would make it much longer. It was then that I realized that she may be lying, but how much? It wasn't until they told us that she could go on Hospice, did I finally question her. What in the hell was wrong with her, physically and emotionally? How could she lie to us and how was I supposed to know what the do when she died? Did she even know or care about how much she had scared all of us or that she had made Dad cry in the car on the first trip up to the Hospital? She simply patted my arm and told me that she was sorry, she wanted to be cremated and that I had to be strong because she couldn't be.
She died the morning after Thanksgiving. I don't really remember much, except that her heart rate spiked to 135 beats per minute as everyone started to leave that night after dinner. Most of you wouldn't understand, but the Holidays were the most important thing to her and I had promised her we would carry on like normal. We had her funeral on December 3rd and it was one of the biggest whirlwinds I had ever been in. Suddenly, it was all over. I had missed the last six weeks of school and I was drowning. This was my second to last semester before student teaching and I was drained, not sure if I wanted to go back to school. After all, it was her dream for me to become a teacher, not me.
But as I went back to work and tried to get back into the swing of things, I realized that it wasn't just her dream. She had asked me to go to school to be a teacher because she saw my potential and knew that was the honest to goodness career that was meant for me. Every day, as I hug my little kiddos goodbye, I think of my Mother and how she would be proud of me because I realized something she had been telling me all along. I am a loving person that needs to reassure those that may feel stifled that they are amazing, intelligent people, just like she did for me.
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