Our mother began to escape into her romance stories.
After dressing in jeans and my cheer jersey, I went bounding down the stairs and found my mother at the kitchen table. That morning, her body and round face, surrounded by her dark, curly, dyed hair, seemed to be smaller.
I didn’t realize how my life was changing. Even as I resisted, my boundaries were being redefined. I was making new friends, and the things I was involved in were sophisticated.
The importance of my parents was diminishing.
As I looked at Mom sitting there, I felt bad she was sitting alone.
For years she had worked at Juvenile Hall, where she’d supervised girls who were runaways, in gangs, were underage prostitutes, were molested or raped, or considered out of control. Most were from dysfunctional homes or had been abandoned.
She said they came through like a chain gang, one after the other, and in my mother’s mind, they were all the same: they weren’t understood, didn’t get a fair shake, and hated their parents.
If they complained to her that life wasn’t fair, mom offered this advice: “Get used to it. That’s life, and nothing’s fair about it. No one’s going to pick you up and hold you, and it’s up to you to make you own way.”
Somes my sister and me wished we were one of those girls.
At least she paid attention to them.
At least she seemed to care about them.
We wondered, did she receive love in a way that she couldn’t at home?
Where did she look for love, now that her husband was an alcoholic, and she couldn’t seem to show emotion to her children?
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Shadow Heart, Fire Heart, a love story about fighting to become vulnerable and intimate, after growing up with walls from the trauma of alcoholism:http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00IK4DJHO
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