My Mother's Day - How Things Can Work Out

Families are such strange and interesting formations. I have friends who have regailed me with the stories of their irritations and inconveniences with their families and complaints about various family member's behaviors, decisions and choices, who then promptly forget and claim their families NEVER have strife or conflict. It becomes a kind of competition of "my family is more harmonious than yours."

Literature and magazine articles suggest that there are a lot of family conflicts and that it is common enough to be part and parcel of the experience of living.

For my Mother's Day, I had my great-niece Alex, and her husband Rob working on helping me take down my Art books from their dusty entombment in the attic stairwell and sort through the ones I mean to keep and the ones I can donate to the South Jersey Artists' Collective Library. I offered them $25 an hour each for 2 hours work. Rob took the books down, I dusted and sorted and Alex typed a list of the titles. 12:30 - 2:30 =$100

I had asked Alex's father, my nephew Joseph, if he wanted to do my front yard - mowing, raking, weed whacking for 2 hour=$100. First he said yes, then he dropped out. He had said he wanted to do yard work for extra money, but the truth is he is not healthy enough for that kind of work anymore. He has suffered from severe divericulosis, so bad that the doctors wanted to remove part of his colon, but he checked himself out of the hospital and he just lives with it. On top of that, he bought into the dark underbelly internet culture and bought "coloidal Silver" a snake oil supplement sold by the unscrupulous to the unwary. It poisoned his kidneys and his liver. He also drinks and smokes and is in his 50's. I fell sorry for him. It's ok that he didn't want to do it. It is hard work. I don't want to either.

I also offered the job to my other nephew, Archie who is always in need of money though gainfully employed as a Union electrician. He said yes and then he also dropped out, but he later changed his mind and came over. I bought a pizza for us.

Archie did a terrific job on the front yard - best job anyone has ever done yet, and he was worth every penny of the $100, plus, he had a chance to visit with his cousin Alex and to meet her husband, Rob.

In my sister's heavier drinking period she had gotten into a battle with our nephew Joseph, Alex's father and our brother Joe's son. Joseph, as I said was into the underbelly of the internet conspiracy nuts and Alex is an antivaccer. Her sister has autism and Alex works with autistic children for her career as an aid, so I suspect she has a deep need to believe autism is caused by something external that can be controlled and not be the real culprit, genetics. So they all argued vehemently.

In my sister's defense, Joseph, Alex and Rob swarmed into her house and showed very bad manners, gobbling up food without waiting until everyone was seated and had been served and leaving without offering to help or to show gratitude. And Sue was drunk and antagonistic and prone for a quarrel. So now none of them speak to one another.

Sue also doesn't speak to our brother Neal, in Philadelphia, because he got tired of her stories of the low life people she encountered on the bus and he blocked her phone calls. She was hurt "After all I have done for him, over and over, and all his crap I have listened to...." So they don't speak anymore either. None of us speak to our sister in West Virginia over her rancor at my father having left living rights to our brother Joe to his house. MaryAnn owns the house but Joe gets to live in it until he dies. She blames us all and her resentment was so volatile that every time I called her I had to listen to a semi-hysterical rant from the beginning to the end. I finally didn't want to hear it anymore and stopped calling. I still send cards which are not reciprocated.

But today, all these young people worked cooperatively and efficiently and got a lot of work done for me. I am particularly pleased with the yard work. It looks so nicde out there now. Archie worked really hard and did a really good job.

Also for my Mother's Day, I got a big box from Lavinia with a sweatshirt, an electric kettle, an assortment of hand creams. From Alex and Rob I got 6 cartons of books sorted and catalogued to donate to the SJAC. From Archie I got a beautifully cleaned up front yard. I wish I could say Uma was good. She was constantly underfoot and the biggest barking annoyance immaginable.

Meanwhile, I think my oldest cat and most loving and devoted Lucky, 17 years old is slowly falling asleep into death. He has slept nonstop for two days. I did get him to sip a small dish of water this morning, but he is just fading away. I try not to think about it because it makes my head and heart and my whole body hurt from the sadness.

Death is everywhere, the old man I used to see when I walked Uma along the railroad track, I called him Railroad Tom, died. I hadn't seen him for a long time so I asked the neighbors that I see. John told me our neighbor Helen Gasparon, another walker like John, told him Tom had gone into the Veterans Hospital last year and died. He was 94 or 92. Every day he walked up the railroad to the 7-11 to buy lottery tickets.

We have only gotten half way through my Art Library, less than half way, because we did the two highest shelves and have three middle shelves still to go. They will take longer because they are smaller books and some shelves may be two books deep.

It was too much stress for me today, and I feel uneasy and sad. Tomorrow I will meet Loren Dann, founder of the SJAC at 11:00 after Quaker Meeting at 10:00, to deliver the books for the library, then I will drive to Clarksboro to pick up Sue to go to brunch/lunch at Maritsa's with Archie and perhaps Bryson. After that, Sue and I are going to find CostCo in Cherry Hill and I am going to get a membership so that I can make an appointment to get tested for hearing aids there. It must be done. I can't ear any more. Everyone sounds as though they are mumbling. Fortunately I can hear the laptop and my phone audiobooks.

Mother's Day - I hardly know what to think about it. I did it; I got pregnant, by chance, carried to a live birth, raised a child to a healthy and successful adulthood, all the while, working full time and part-time and earning our keep and buying this little house. I cleaned the house and mowed the yard, and did without a car for many years. It was a long hard hike uphill in thin oxygen, but I did it. Somehow, I found the strength. When I think about that, what comes to me is that I really had no choice - I had to find a way to do it - find the strength to get through it. I don't have any feelings beyond that except a deep gratitude that my child was born healthy and whole and that she was a good child and an easy one, at least until adolescence, but that was near the end, so it didn't last that long - maybe only a third of the child rearing experience, from 15 to 18 when she left, the same age I was when I left home and like me, she never came back. She is, I suppose, a happy and resourceful adult living her own life.

Happy trails, long and winding though they may be and sometimes trails of tears,

wrightj45@yahoo.com