I don’t remember a time I was ever this angry. I’m stomping, defiant, to work in the mornings. Vigilant at the dog park w/ Bean, waiting for any infraction, any sign of negligence, any excuse to start a war of words with another dog owner. I hear the neighbors in the garage by the washing machine and I feel my blood start to race. It’s as if I’m trying to fill my blood with bile. I keep asking B—- why I’m so angry – he rubs my shoulders and tells me he does not know. He says I’m saving up for something.
I cannot blame the same old excuse again. I look everywhere else. Early menopause? Going off the Cymbalta? Not working out enough? The thought of going back to counseling; harping on about exactly the same topic I’ve never been able to kick. I know right now she is sitting around her house without power in a winter storm. She calls to let me know that yes, the power is still out. Yes, her pipes might freeze and the temperature is expected to drop and yet there she sits, waiting for the calamity instead of calling a friend w/ power and heat and keeping herself from freezing as well. As if she’s going to breathe on the pipes and keep them from bursting. She certainly has enough wind for it.
The anger has been building for 3 years now, since the winter when she was supposed to die. I remember everything. Me, who cannot recall the person I met the night before, or where I was on any given New Years (except that one), or what my husband was wearing on our first date. I remember every detail like I’m still in the moment. Which albums I played on repeat in the car, her car, as I drove back and forth to the hospital. The reflection of ice on black pavement, the pierce to my upper chest as I took a deep breath in the frozen air, the feel of my dreadlocks, freezing like icicles as I walked back from the micro-gym hot tub in the condo complex. The feel of the mildew coating the inside of my bronchial passages as I washed her fucking yellow gingham twin bed set for the 4th time, hoping against hope they would come clean.
I don’t know how to shake this anger. I’m tired of being the grown up. Tired of being the rational one in the conversation. Tired of her micro-focus on the tiniest detail while completely oblivious to the state of her own psychological disintegration. I’m tired of hearing her repeated woes, all preventable (for those who earn money). I’m tired of her integrity and to-a-fault honesty – telling someone in an interview that she has a 90 year old mother who might die, and she would need to take time of work if that happened. I’m accused of belittling her if I dare suggest she might not want to present that detail during a job interview. Yet she bemoans the fact she cannot get a job. I’m tired of biting my tongue because she’ll take helpful hints the wrong way, because tired of giving her help when she does not ask and does not say thank you, even though she calls to tell me the “Top 10 ways she knows she’s poor if..” every single fucking week.
I think above all, I’m angry and tired because for a brief period of time, she was normal. For just a few months I could talk to her and have a normal conversation, a normal discussion. For just a period of time she did not have to think about how she would feed herself, how she would get gas in the car, how to pay for this winter’s oil bill. For the period of time when she was dying, and in the hospital, and on anti-anxiety and depression medication, she was a completely normal, conversant, rational, adult, human being. I got to see for the first, and now I know, only, time in my life, what it would be like to communicate normally with my mother.
And now she’s still here, but she’s gone.