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2002-01-16 / 1:22 p.m. ~76 Years Old, Today~ Today is my mother's 76th birthday. I can't even imagine my mother at 76 years old. She died when she was 52, a mere shell of who she really was. Inside, she was gone before that, outside she faded away. But, of course, when I saw the date, January 16th, I thought, yeah, today's her birthday, how old would she be now? And I stopped to calculate. Stopped to imagine. And I can't. She was an amazing person though. I'm not sure I really knew her, not while she was alive, she was just my mom then. After she died I found papers, letters, photos, I put pieces together, I talked to her mother, who survived her, I learned who the woman was, the woman who wasn't my mother, I mean before she was my mother. And in a way, it seemed that marrying my father, having three children, sort of ruined her, took away her vibrancy, if that's a word. Not that she was a bad mother, or that parenting didn't suit her, but she was this incredible free spirit, this worldly, fascinating person, and she got trapped in a situation. Or so it seems to me now. I was also thinking about her last week, about how I never saw her in a healthy relationship with a man. When I was a small child my father traveled. I have few memories of actually living with him, as a child. I remember that once we moved here, down South, he and my mother fought a lot, and my mother would use me as a sort of go-between, sort of, "Would you tell your father that dinner is ready?", or "Please go tell your father blah, blah, blah", etc. And he lived in the downstairs bedroom, the spare room, while she lived upstairs. A '60s tri-level ranch house. Maybe I was always outside, playing with neighborhood kids. Maybe I went to bed early. Maybe I only remember that one big fight they had when my mom threw the sugar bowl to the floor in a loud, rather frightening crash, and all I could think about, at 6 years old, was, Wow, what a mess! Sugar everywhere, that's going to be impossible to clean up! And was she coming back after she left? Pop was suddenly someone we visited, he had his own apartment. It was fun to go someplace else. But I hated that he saw other women, hated that when we went to Philadelphia on a summer vacation we had to stay with that one woman, and I wondered what she was to him, how close were they, why was there someone else? I didn't understand. My mother didn't see other men, not right away. After we moved again there was that one guy, Eddie, and I knew that he was an Aries, like me. My mom must've told me. She would fuck him in the afternoons, I'd come home from school to find her bedroom door locked, she'd be in there, with him, and I could hear her moaning with pleasure, hear her sex sounds. I hated it. I didn't understand, all I knew was she was doing something secret and she wasn't there for me. One night Eddie came banging on our front door, supposedly inebriated, and my mom wouldn't let him in. I was excited, this was terribly exciting and dangerous and fun and wild. We called the police! Then there was the Indian, Culjeet, and I don't know how to spell his name, but that's how it sounded. One time I looked into my mother's bedroom, saw them lying together in bed, sleeping, and Culjeet's turban was off, revealing a very long black ponytail. He bought me a bicycle, with a banana seat and those curvy handlebars. I wanted my mother to marry him. But she sent him away, I guess. After my sister was killed my mother was consumed. She never recovered. There was no more romance, no more afternoon delights. No more men. For six years. I think at one point she was in love with her therapist, but other than that there was nothing. She and I lived together, I saw my father for dinner, the symphony, Christmas, Thanksgiving, my birthday, his birthday, road trips, he remained distant, emotionally inaccessible. My mother found a lump, a tumor, she had cancer, she got the radiation treatments, they killed her. End of a life. But she'd lived. She'd grown up in Chicago, on Lake Michigan, her parents divorced when she was a child. Her father was a commercial pilot, he remarried, had another daughter, my mother and her half-sister became best friends, they lived with their father in Colombia, South America, went to high school there, learned Spanish. My mother moved to Mexico City, married a man in his 40s, she was 19. He was a gangster�carried a gun. My grandmother said he beat my mother so she left him. My mother had suitors, so many suitors, and they took her to swanky clubs, this was in the 1940s, the kind of clubs you see in those old movies, with those padded booths, the cigarette girl coming by to sell you cancer sticks, the girl with the camera to capture the moment on film, and I have those moments, I have those pictures, my mother with this handsome man, and that handsome man, all of them looking at her adoringly, and she was exotic looking and beautiful, poised, desirable, unattainable� 76 years old, today. She couldn't have lived to this age, she was meant to burn out early, she wasn't supposed to be old, it didn't suit her. But, selfishly, I wish I had a mother, I wish I had a sister, I wish I had a father, grandparents, family, and sometimes I dream of making my own family, a family of friends, or a new lover, or kids of my own, adopted or otherwise. Other times I see me as alone, a woman of independent means, and that is my destiny, my challenge is to embrace it, not just accept it. Cost of the War in Iraq
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