She has been gone since I was a child. I could regale you with tales of her periodic visits in one state or another or of the few early childhood memories I do have that would explain just what type of person she was and what type of experiences she left behind for her children but at the moment I don't think I'm particularly strong enough to.
My parents were never married and hardly constituted as together if one chooses to believe the stories. My older sister was from before my parents got together for the first time. My brother is from after they got together but most assuredly not my father's child. I was born eleven months after my father's girlfriend had given birth to her and my father's first child. The baby boy was given away to a Jewish family in Encino. After me came my younger brother by two and a half years and this spurred my father's girlfriend in to becoming my stepmother. Though, if I'm honest with myself, she was my mum from the start.
To put the long of it into the short my mother was a whore, an addict, had severe dependency issues and was an all-around moral-less individual. She has left scars so deep and profound on her children that they have created our most defining characteristics. However, the way I remember her leaving, the things she said and what she did left one of the biggest traits that I possess in its wake.
My apologies if this is rambling or doesn't quite stay on topic.
Anyway, years passed by and I was something above first grade but bellow third when my mother left. I remember going to an airport and trying not to cry, though I did anyway. I remember she hugged me and said that she was going away for my good-- for my brother and me. She said she was going to Texas to live with some of her family (never verified). I remember being so sad and overwhelmed and not being "big" enough to handle this. I remember my older brother seeming to be angry and sullen and grieving already. He loved her so much. I loved her so much. She was my mother. She was my heart. She was my mother.
I never got over her leaving me. When I was in school on the following Mother's Day I drew a picture of her on one side of a fence and me on the other as my Mother's Day card. My teacher requested I do another with soft words and sad eyes. I drew one for my mum (read: stepmother). As I grew up and started to comprehend the horrors of the world I began to take solace in the fact that my mother left.
I don't ever remember feeling abandoned by her because she had always had a habit of disappearing and reappearing months later (with a new man or, in one instance, a couple who were "kind" enough to look after her). I guess I always expected her to come back eventually. I remember when we moved from our apartment to a house in another city that I worried that mother wouldn't be able to find us again because she didn't know where we lived.
I remember dismissing this shortly because she wasn't to come again. I wasn't to see her anymore. Besides, I had my mum, why should I look for another mother? (I've always held a certain amount of shame and guilt for 'replacing' my mother, especially when I was young. It wasn't until I was seventeen or so that I started to deal with this.)
I used to have day dreams that my mother would come rescue me from the void that I lived in, from the sheer loneliness and purposeless that was my being (most heavily in middle school).
But no matter how much I wished she would appear (preferably a millionaire and happily well-balanced, as she'd never been when I'd known her) I always was comforted by the fact that she had left.
And the older I got the more I was comforted by it. Because it had been a truly selfless and perfect act performed by a deeply flawed and corrupt individual. I never had to convince myself that when she left it was for the best because I had known it was for the best. She caused so many problems and difficulties that it could only be positive for her to leave our lives and allow our (seemingly) more stable and secure father to raise us. To me, at the time, she had been the only real saint there could be. I didn't, and still don't, believe that a 'saintly' individual is one who avoids all 'sin'. I believe a saint should be an individual whose life is full of sin and corruption and yet still performs extreme acts of selflessness that benefit everyone else and are only a detriment to themselves.
To know what it is like to sin and still act with grace is a more wondrous act than any pure individual can comprehend.
She had been the only person I had ever met or heard of who had truly done something completely morally centered. To me, she was my hope. Not in return. She should never return. Ever. But in humanity. I saw so much in humans that was evil and disgusting and there was so little in the way of morality that was truly deserving that I would falter and fail and fall into these detached episodes of utter dejection and hopelessness. I would drift from myself and run entirely without thinking about my day to day actions. I would lean about, completely out of it, and despairing over how wretched humanity was. Until I remembered her and what she had done.
She gave me my standard for morality. To do what is right and true above what is wanted or easier. But it was more than that. She showed me that one didn't need to be constantly upright or "good" in the contemporary sense to be moral. She showed me that one could have faults a-plenty and still do what is entirely right and true. And I don't mean altruistic because that is merely a sham for those whom feel guilt about their own existence.
Because of her I always expected people to be morally good. I still expect people to be good, at their core. Because it wasn't a matter of flaws or problems or pettiness but of knowing what is right and then doing it.
And then, now, at twenty, to learn what I based my standards for humanity is false more than wounded me, it crippled me. I've been unable to do anything useful or what I should. It isn't so much that I don't believe in the moral center that every individual has but it is an utter and unfathomable grief that my own mind hides from itself.
I've only felt tired and empty since this discovery. It's a black mood, indeed. I don't want to think because it will inevitably lead to me thinking about my dead mother, my childish and selfish stepmother, my overly faulted brothers, my egotistical and manipulative sister, and last but never least, my monster of a father.
He killed her. He lied to me. He hurt us all. And he doesn't care at all. He hurt his children. He hurt us. I know I'm being repetitive but it's so hard to grasp even though I know its verity. He ignored us all for my entire life so far. He only ever recognizes us when he wants something or when it benefits him to do so. This would devastate anyone but it hits me so hard all the time because I can't stop believing that it's possible that he will do better; that they all will do better even though I don't expect it to happen. It's like a new heartbreak every time I have to remind myself that my hope is fruitless. That, for some people, right does not constitute an obligation to act a certain way and that seems entirely incomprehensible to me.
Because if it weren't for them I wouldn't have this unshakable moral compass and this unrelenting hope but everyday they still never fail to fail me.
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