I am going to try something and I am not sure if I will be successful at it.  Frankly, I am not sure if I am ready for it, but as with most things you have to try.

My over-arching goal in life is to live more whole. To put pieces together, sew them up as best as I can and live peacefully – a tough task.

The one and only word to be honest besides CF that comes to mind is my mother.  My mother.  I don’t even say my mom because I don’t feel like I have one.  I don’t feel like I am her daughter.

I have read that it takes society 20 to 30 years to put a tragedy into perspective; to analyze it to write about it, well.  I take this into consideration.

I just finished Maya Angelou’s book “Mom & Me & Mom”.  She writes about the role of a mother:

“She had my back, supported me.  This is the role of the mother, and in that visit I saw clearly, and for the first time, why a mother is really important.  Not just because she feeds and also loves and cuddles and even mollycoddles a child, but because in an interesting and maybe an eerie and unworldly way, she stands in the gap.  She stands between the unknown and the known.  In Stockholm, my mother shed her protection love down around me and without knowing why people sensed I had value” (p. 170). 

I pause and clasp my hands.

The first thing that comes to my mind is when I was 19 years old, striving to leave the past in the past, to rebuild.  I can do this.

I asked my mom to swap cars because I was moving and she had a van and I had a sedan.  I cleaned out my car to be safe because my mom had been known to go through my things, snoop, crossing boundaries. I had very little trust for her, trying to trust, but we swapped. I finished moving my things and drove to my parents’ house to swap back cars.  She said she may go out and do a couple errands but she would be back.

I pulled-up to the house and I go up to the front door.  There is a note, “I will be back soon.  Dad is downstairs taking a nap” my mom writes.

“Odd,” I thought because my Dad usually is at work during the day.  Not sure.

They have an alarm system.  They put it in a couple years back when I lived up north.  My mom thought at that time a burglar tried to get in the house.  She claimed it was me trying to break in.  I never admitted anything.

A quick back story:  when I came back from running away to “The Bridge for Runaway youth” I said I wanted to live with my friend Stacy at the time.  I called Stacy at that house and she said her parents would allow it and my mother was “slightly” upset.  I was choosing their family over them, my mother later told me.

I was looking for sanity.  I was in a bad place and mentally I knew I needed to get out.  The energy was very dark and very heavy.  My mother told me what I said and felt did not matter.  I knew it did.

Stacy came to the house alone with her car.  She could not step foot in the yard.  I had to move each item out myself.  I moved a lot because I did not know how long I would be gone.  We needed to make two trips and I said to my mother, “I will be back in an hour, two tops.  I still need to get my machines” (my CF machines) and a few other items.

We came back and my mother locked the door.  The house was locked up tight and there was no way of getting in. She already snatched the key from me so I was out of luck. Weeks prior I had left my bedroom window unlocked, just in case.  I climbed up the back porch and jumped over the railing on the second floor back porch.  I tried to pry open my window and it was locked.  I proceeded in desperation to open it because it had a strong suction on it.  In order to do so, I took up part of the frame and popped it out and nails went flying.  I had strong adrenaline flowing. It was locked.  I popped the frame back in place but the nails went down through the porch cracks there and was no way of fixing it. I was enraged.

My mother separated me from my machines.  From my breathing machines. From the machines I use to keep myself alive.  I have skipped my treatments in the past, yes – but my mother locked up my breathing machines from me.  I may have really needed them that night.  Who does that?

While living up north they came upon the frame that was half screwed in and half not.  They believed someone had tried to break in. After some thought my mother asked me explicitly if I had done it. I said no. We had a stare down. I was not budging.

Why would I admit to doing that after having my life up-rooted; I started a new school, not allowed to speak to my friends, and placed on a farm 200 miles away with crazy Annie who thought her husband was going to kill her because he said he would? He abused her and she fled with her kids.  One night we came home and one of the doors was cracked open.  I went in first, with a broom cause Annie thought it was her ex-husband around the corner. I remember entering that house – going WHAT THE FUCK.  SERIOUSLY. Knowing this was not my life.  Will not be my life.  Counting the days to freedom.  He was not there, but the fear was still alive in Annie, so much so she her hair would fall out.

Time-to-time my mom threatened to do more.  So, common sense told me to say “No, I did not do that.”

Thus – back to the moving day.  I still did not have my own key, but there was a key on the car key chain. The note on the door did not make sense to me, but I was hungry and my sugars were getting low.  I needed to eat.  I did not feel safe to drive.  I was desperate. I entered the door and ran downstairs to wake my father.  He was not there, just as my gut told me.

The alarm began to sound. I did not have a code for the alarm.  The dog was going nuts to I let her out in the yard.  She blasted out of there.  I took down the phone number of the company and in between alarm uprisings I called the company.  Apparently, it reset every 15 minutes.  I gave them my social security, date-of-birth – I did not have access.

By that time, it resounded.  A police officer came to the door in the midst of that and I stated who I was, explained the situation as much as I could.  He believed me, in a way.  The dog knew me and I wasn’t exiting the house with an arm full of televisions so, okay my story seemed half-baked but not total. He pulled out of the driveway and sat half a block down the street, watching.

My mother said something about going to “Perkins”, a local “Friendly’s” like place. I called 3 Perkins restaurants and gave my mother’s description over the alarm sounds – nothing. I left messages with all 3 places.

I needed to eat.  So – I made peanut butter toast.

Finally, my mother opened the door.

“Hurry, put the code in!”

She looked at me; I looked at her, and, I felt, our entire history locked.  This was our relationship.  I had to break in to my house. I had no access.  She did not trust me.  I did not trust her. This was it.

What was this?

She plugged in the code.

“How did you get in?” she asks me.

“I opened the door. You left a note saying Dad was sleeping downstairs, even though I thought he was at work and you didn’t say anything about him being home.”

“I didn’t want to leave a note to the robbers that I wasn’t home,” she says.

I guess not.

I went on to say what happened, what I did.

“Is that all they did?” my mom asks.

“Yep.”

They didn’t haul me away in a paddy wagon so – I guess her plan failed. I will give her that they did invest in this security system and probably wondering what they paying for? But- still.

I left, in a somber mood.  Ecstatic to be back in my car, going to my apartment, to my friends, to my life.

“She stands in the gap”, Maya says.  My mother created the gaps, she does not bridge them. I have to save myself from jumping from them.

She did not know me. I did not know her.

Only things I knew from walking away that day is I had nothing with them. I was happy not to be thrown in a paddy wagon and that this situation was not to happen again.

To become whole one must make peace with the past.

This is my attempt.

Does she know me?

Will I ever know her?

Citation:

Angelou, Maya. Mom & Me & Mom. New York. Random House, Inc. 2013