Life Lessons

Life Lessons
It doesn’t happen every year, but every couple of years it
hits me, for no reason, no triggers, nothing different happens, just life…
I woke up this morning, and was 16 years old, standing in a
cold hallway of McKenzie Willamette Hospital where the walls, floors, blankets
and lighting are all a colorless hue of blue, walking away from the room where
I and my family had just spent the last week or so. It was Valentine’s Day. All of us were walking away except for
one. We left one person behind, my
mom. A very sad memory; a very sad day,
today, for me, even more sad that when it happened. A selfish, self-absorbed, careless teenager I
didn’t fully realize what had just happened, the poignancy of the moment. Mom, was sick for a long time, she lost her
battle with cancer, and I lost my mom and teacher for the rest of my life.
My mom grew up horribly poor, living in a tent poor. She herself was the first of 3 children. She married my dad when she was only 15 or 16
years old, never finished high school and started having children; four in
total. Dad was in the Army and for the
most part the family moved as he moved with the exception of service during war
time. They lived as far away from home
as Germany, Virginia, Colorado, and close as Astoria. When mom was either 31 or 32 I was born. Dad was still in Vietnam, but returned
shortly after I was born. They bought
the house on Kintzley where dad still lives today and he retired from the Army
and went to work for Weyerhaeuser.
My mom, was fabulous at being a mom. It wasn’t any one thing that she did, it was
that she loved wholly, she wanted the best for everyone and she gave for the
benefit of her children. She enjoyed
being in the kitchen, cooking and baking for her family, being able to provide
for them, she was horrible at managing money, she didn’t like to play board
games and the like, but enjoyed watching her family play, she was an
exceptional seamstress; she could sew you anything you wanted; clothes,
sleeping bags, toys, she canned everything from jam to spaghetti sauce, you
name it our pantry was stocked, she feed us handfuls of vitamins every day, we
could have cookies but our cookies had peanut butter, oatmeal, raisins,
walnuts, chocolate chips and anything else she had laying around that would
make those cookies “healthy”.
After, what I’m sure what felt like a lifetime of suppression
mom started a new page in her life. One where
she was earning her own money, gaining self-respect from working among her
peers. She took a job at McKenzie
Willamette Hospital, when I was in Kindergarten (irony at its worst in
hindsight.) She worked in the kitchen,
putting her talents to work for others. And a couple years later she divorced
my dad. Apparently getting out of the
house and seeing the world threw new eyes gave her the perspective she needed
to move on with her life. Did she go to
work because she was so very feed up with her home life or to broaden her
horizons, was it always her plan to leave my dad, did she have a plan or was
she just living by the seat of her pants?
These are questions that I will never be able to ask…another life lesson
that I’m forced to define the meaning of on my own.
We did our own moving after the divorce; Springfield to
Alaska to Springfield, all around town, then to Lebanon. All the while mom trying to hold it together
as her children grew up and moved away, leaving just me and her together. She took a job with OSU around 1984 when I
was in middle school and we moved to Lebanon; where it all finally came to an
end for her.
I believe that mom was her happiest when her children were
together and she was taking care of them.
I believe that she lived a very sad life which had the potential to be a
happy one should she have made better decisions so many years ago when she was
a teenager. She had limited skills and a
big heart. She should have stayed home,
being a mom; although with a better husband.
It’s what she loved; it’s what made her happy and what she was good at. Although I know my dad loved my mom, his love
was poisonous to her. She chose poorly
and paid year after year the consequences of it.
Standing in that cold hallway in the hospital, I was sad
because I had lost my mom, my childhood.
Today I’m sad because as an adult I realize that she lost the opportunity
to get it right, to finish a lifetime of work, to retire, to be a grandmother,
and truly find the happiness that she wanted and deserved so badly.
Life is a series of decisions, every single day, they will
pass you by if stand still too long (yes Ferris Bueller was right) however
sometimes it can take you a VERY long time to overcome just one poor decision –
so choose wisely and with great intent, so as not to waste the lessons of a
life that passed to soon.