Sometimes Strength Comes in Small Broken Packages
I Had It All Wrong
I came home from school to find a dead cat in a cardboard box in the kitchen. I could only look at it through squinted eyes, head turned mostly away.
I was horrified, revolted and fascinated all at once.
My mom had warned me it was in there, but still it took me by surprise. She had gone back to school to get her teaching certificate, and dissecting a cat was part of the science curriculum.
It didn’t occur to me at the time how hard this must have been for her. She of the bleeding heart and sensitive soul. She collected stray animals like some collect coupons.
To sit in a classroom full of dead cats, load one into her car, carry it into her home, and actually cut it apart had to have been brutal for her. She had no desire to be a scientist or doctor. She simply wanted to be able to get a decent job after being out of the workforce for a couple of decades.
For most of her life, I thought of my mom as weak. I was wrong. She’s actually one of the strongest people I’ve known.
My mom’s sobs echo off the bathroom walls. She sits in the tub every night to cry, thinking she’s protecting us from the depths of her pain. But the sound of her sobbing travels throughout the house.
Dad has finally moved out. I’ve begged her to leave him for the past few years. After every eruption, every explosion, every rage, “Leave him Mom. Just leave him.” But he has left her. And now she tries to dissolve her anguish in a tepid soup of sorrow every night.
They had been separated for about a year before now. The divorce was close to being final and all of a sudden, he came back. My mom bent and folded and contorted herself to be pleasing to him when he returned. To make him stay. But it was worse than before. His anger, his rage. The words thrown around like little bombs detonating.
This in-between time lasted a few years. This time when things were worse. And I always wondered why he came back. It made no sense.
Years later I am driving with my beloved grandad. I don’t remember how we got on the subject, but he tells me that he and my grandmother (my dad’s parents) compelled my dad to go back. “We were afraid your mom was going to kill herself, and we couldn’t let you live with that.”
A different kind of little bomb detonating.
There were years of misery before my parents actually got divorced. Years of fighting, infidelity (my dad), walking on eggshells (my mom) and a thick tension that made it feel like the house couldn’t quite contain us.
I hated the desperation that oozed off my mom. She had never wanted to be anything other than a wife and mother. The more she felt her life slipping out from under her, the more desperate to hold onto my dad she seemed to become.
My dad used to pick stupid fake fights so that he could storm out of the house, no doubt to go meet up with a mistress. Once he was pulling out of the garage after such a scene when my mom draped herself over the hood of his moving car, crying and begging him not to leave. He continued to drive (slowly) down the driveway with my mom splayed on the mustard yellow car.
Although I was upset to witness yet another blow up, I remember being more mortified that the neighbors could see and hear this drama. And while I hated my dad during this time, I was almost equally disdainful of my mom because of what I saw as her weakness and dependence.
I swore to myself I would never be like her.
I hear my mom crying before I’ve even gotten the phone to my ear. “I can’t take it any more. She’s driving me crazy,” she wails before I’ve had a chance to say hello.
This is a common refrain, and I immediately know exactly who she’s talking about. My sister is an impossible, unfixable mix of mental illness, autism, rage and volatility. When she is in a state, which is most of the time, there can be no reasoning, no pacifying, no stilling her anger or diffusing her diatribes.
She manages to live independently, but with a lot of management and help from my mom, but she is actually wholly unequipped to deal with every day life on her own. At first she did ok. Now she does not.
Her mental state has steadily deteriorated over the past decade, yet we are helpless when it comes to making decisions for her or steering her toward services that might be able to improve her life. We have no rights.
My mom has had to call the police on her own daughter, again. She quit answering my sister’s calls for the day (after more than 25), so my sister has shown up in the night, enraged, and is banging the heavy brass knocker on my mom’s front door, screaming and cursing, blasting loud, angry rock music from her car left running in front of the house.
My mom is scared to open the door, but my sister won’t leave. The police are called. They deal with my sister outside.
On the other side of the door, my mom cries and calls me.
It took me becoming a mom to clue into the depths of what my mom dealt with raising my sister. I can only imagine the level of fear, frustration, worry and angst my mom had to permanently carry on her back like a heavy tortoise shell.
She had a child who defied definitive diagnosis, didn’t fit in anywhere and struggled with everything. A child who would never be able to properly support herself or have fulfilling relationships.
I am ashamed of how selfishly I skipped through my younger years, oblivious to the daily burden my mom carried.
She carried that burden until the day she died, and I’ve only truly understood it now that I have inherited the responsibility of my sister.
I’m driving when I get a call from an unknown number. I let it go to voicemail. But the same number calls right back.
It’s a stranger’s voice when I answer, but he knows my name. I hear other voices in the background.
The man tells me that he is my mom’s neighbor. That she has fallen and seems to be badly injured. I tell him I’m on my way.
I happen to be in the area, and I beat the ambulance to my mom’s house. She is laying where she fell on her back porch. She is conscious and alert but in a lot of pain. She has broken her femur.
She had been putting out food for the menagerie of stray cats, raccoons and possums she fed daily on her back porch when she slipped on some water and went crashing down.
Her phone was inside the house. She laid on the concrete and screamed for help until the neighbors heard and came to her rescue.
It’s 2020. My mom has to spend weeks in a rehab hospital after surgery. She is not allowed to have visitors.
I talk to her every day, and she never complains about being alone or being hurt. She just wants to know about her cats.
Of all the heartbreaking images I carry of my mom, this one may be the one that makes me saddest: To think of her scared, crumpled on the ground, broken and yelling for help makes my heart feel like it wants to ooze outside of my body.
I hate that she was alone.
After marrying my dad, she lived in Texas the rest of her life, although her family all lived in her hometown of New Orleans. She didn’t want to disrupt our lives or move us away from our dad, so she stayed.
She never remarried. She turned down a proposal from her longtime companion because she decided she’d rather be alone than someone’s end-of-life nursemaid.
My mom lived alone until she died at 84.
Up until close to the end when she was wasting away with cancer, my mom maintained her independence and her spunk. She drove, changed lightbulbs, cleaned house, grocery shopped, ran errands, took care of her four cats and her outdoor menagerie and went to lunch with friends.
She managed most of the day to day dealings with my sister and handled all the minutiae of my sister’s life that she couldn’t handle on her own. She accompanied friends to doctor appointments, volunteered at the food bank, doted on her grandkids and was a constant source of support for me. And she never lost her sense of humor.
I had it all wrong.
I grew up determined not to be needy or weak. To never show the kind of desperation or vulnerability I saw in her.
What I failed to realize at the time was that I was actually witnessing her breaking apart before she could break through to the other side of her grief and fear. I was running away from the shadow of her fragility when I could have been standing in the light of her resilience.
I see it now.
My mom was a tiny lady with a great big spirit and a strength that settled on her like a warm blanket after a snowstorm.
A strength that was quiet like cat paws but fierce like the storm.
There’s a tree outside my mom’s house that was planted when I was a toddler. It’s nothing special. No blooms or bountiful fruit. Just a typical live oak like you see all over Texas.
As live oaks go though, she’s a beauty. She towers over the house she used to be dwarfed by. She’s lush and stately and quietly beautiful. She’s survived hail, tornado force winds, 110 degree summers and unexpected winter freezes.
She was there when I was small enough to play under her canopy and later when my mom and I picnicked beneath her with my kids. She was there when my dad was around and for most of her life, when he wasn’t.
She was there when my mom sobbed in the bathtub and when my sister banged on the front door. When my dad drove down the driveway and when my mom laid on the back porch calling for help.
She’s been there my entire life, although it took me growing up to really notice her. She’s been through all the storms, and still she stands. Graceful, softly majestic and so, so strong.
Does That Make Sense is Kelly Kearsley’s Substack pub where topics run the gamut from face spiders to full frontal to Tony Danza. The common denominator? Kelly’s hilarious take on life and her ability to connect seemingly unrelated dots between weirdly wonderful musings on everyday minutiae.
Blue Runner Creole Cream Style Red Beans - My mom was from New Orleans, so I grew up with red beans and rice in regular dinner rotation. These come readymade in a can, but don’t let that scare you. Just heat and dump on rice, and you’ve got the quickest and easiest N’awlins meal. You can doctor them up or add meat (they’re vegetarian), but they are yummy as is. I think they’re a Southern thing so they may not be in your local stores, but you can order them online.
If you’re a White Lotus fan, then you’re familiar with international pop mega-star Lisa, even if you don’t know it. Many are unaware that the actress playing hotel employee Mook is actually one of the biggest musical artists of today. Lalisa Manobal is the lead singer of K-pop sensation Blackpink and has released albums on her own. Sharing one of her music videos today where you can see her in her full rockstar glory.
For more about my one-of-a-kind mom, read this:
For more about my one-of-a-kind sister, read this:
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Beautiful. I wish I had known her better.
Wowwwwwwww. I can't explain how I feel right now. This is beautiful and raw and I resonate with it so fully while at the same time understanding that I've never allowed myself to say what you are saying here, but that I need to say at last. I've always seen my mom as weak. But in the moments you describe where you were wrong about your mom, where she was actually the exact opposite, I see reflections of my mother, and I realize I may have had it all wrong all this time.
Phew, I've got to sit with this . . . but I think this right here is what makes Substack such a glorious thing, a life raft, a golden thread of connection. All of this to say, this is a piece of writing that will stay with me for a long time, maybe always, and I hope you take that as the highest form of compliment.