August 26, 2007

  • Remembering

    When I was 12, I wasn’t a lot different than I am now. I played around a lot, was a tom boy… and my parents took care of me. I fought with my brothers a lot, but I loved them anyway. I never wanted to make my parents upset.. but I still did things I wasn’t supposed to. My mom and dad loved me so much, I was their special little girl. And I was spoiled rotten. I would sing loudly to any music I knew the words too, and would pretend I was an opera singer if there was no music. *I don’t do that so much anymore * Did you know if you sing loud enough, you don’t sound sound too bad in your own head? It’s true.. try it sometime.

    My mom was an amazing person, she took care of us all… when my dad was alive.. she always put us kids first, but still managed to take care of him as well.  She found great joy in taking care of us… making us costumes, extra special treats for school events/birthdays. She would make me the prettiest dresses. I had lots of sundresses with lace and yellow flowers. My mom wanted me to learn to sew, I never did.. hopefully I’ll learn someday.

    The night before my dad died, my mom stayed up extra late to help me type an extra credit paper for the daughters of the american revolution type thing. She overslept by 2 or 3 hours because of it, woke up to find my dad unconcious on the bedroom floor, his body cool and his color turning blue. We stopped by my school on the way to the hospital to see if he had lived, to drop off that damn paper.

    My mom worked very hard before and after my dad died. She took his life insurance and invested it into a company a friend of hers had started. She worked 18+ hours a day many days. She was so incredibly smart. She took that company from a make up/swatch business and turned it into a fairly successful home accessory/design company. They made pillows, home accessories, decorative boxes and many other unique things. My mom was the one who figured out how to make the complicated stuff.. how to make it the most economical way and still have the quality to set it apart from the cheapo import stuff. She got contracts from Waterman pens… Red Door perfume… Vyctoria Secrets.. and more. Nothing to make us rich, because any profit she would have made, she just invested back into the company. She took the minimal pay check, just enough to pay the bills *sometimes not even that much* so she could keep the company growing. Her partner, was “pretty” but an airhead with no mind for buiness. Her mother was overbearing and just a general bitch. One day her partner’s mom decided she was bored and wanted to help run the company. My mom had no clue. She showed up one day and her “partner” told her that she didn’t think they could work together anymore and asked her to leave. My mom was a trusting person. When she loaned the money to this woman, she had minimal paperwork … nothing stating she would own any % of the company.. just a note that the partner would pay her back. The partner consider my mom’s minimal pay checks .. and the pay checks to me and my brothers *we helped them when it was very busy, crafting stuff, cleaning the office, running errands in town on foot.. going to pick up food/lunch when clients came to town, etc* as payment of the loan.. she even tried to right off company bills as payment to my mom *ie .. her sending my mom to pizzahut to get food for her, her kids and my mom and me and my brothers cause we were working late*. This woman, will burn in hell for how she treated my mom.. I’m sure of this.

    My mom never quite recovered from this. She’d invested what remained of her youth into a budding buisness. She went from 42 to 53.. and had nothing at all to show for it.. no 401k.. no savings.. no life insurance.. nothing. She was emotionally and phsyically exhausted.. yet she still, tried her best to take care of my brothers and I. She’d help us with any bills, bought our school clothes *while in college* help with anything and everything. She knew everything… she really did. I’ve always said she was the smartest person I’ve ever known. I have no idea what I’ll do without that bank of knowledge.

    After recovering from the initial shock of having lost her nest egg and not having the will to fight to get any of it back, my mom started working for J. Crew.. doing a low paying telemarketing job.. working as many extra hours as she could.. she also started working for a local lawn equipment distributor as a sales assistant. Doing office/clerical work. She worked from 8am – noonish there then left to go to J.Crew from 1 or 2pm till 10pm or even midnight. She was a much stronger person than I will ever be. I’d never be able to keep those sort of hours. I just don’t have it in me. But she kept on… trying to regain some of what she’d lost. She worked till she was near an exhaustion break down. Finally she had a bit of luck and got hired full time to the lawn distrubution company and she thrived. She never made a lot of money, but they appreciated her for all she had to offer. Her amazing sense of buisness.. her insane intelligence.. her dry humor… and just her kind nature. Her bosses really cared about her I think.. and my mom cared for them in return. I was so proud of everything she accomplished there. Wishing I could do something like that.. and wishing she’d found them years earlier.

    After 4 years or so there, a week or so after my dad’s mother died .. we were returning from spreading her ashes in Mass. My mom was super tired, and had been coming up with massive brusining.. even from the lightest touch. The day we came home, she was covered from head to toe with tiny lil purple specs.. thousands of tiny blood vessles rupturing. Her body was killing her plateletts in mass. It took them a year to figure out what was wrong with her.. it went from cancer to lupus and on and on.. finally they figured it was some rare blood disorder, which they had no clue what caused it or any real way to treat it. They told her there was a smalll chance that removing her spleen would correct the problem. 3 other people with the same disorder as my mom.. had that surger on the same day as my mom.. my mom was the only person it worked for. So again, some weird luck. The day before her surgery, however, they desovered the medication they’d been giving her to slow down the disease, had caused her to become diabetic.. the doctors just didn’t catch it.. and when they were doing her routine testing before sugery, they were shocked that she was still able to speak her sugars were so messed up.

    The years following that illness, my mom fought with diabetis..  and started noticing her memory was failing her. Also she’d drop things she was holding.. a lot more than normal clumsiness could account for. The memory thing started to effect her work.. so she had some testing done, turned out her carrotid arteries were severly blocked and they thought she’d have a series of mini-strokes. She was terrorfied of becoming a vegitable.. or somehow losing her mind and being put in a nursing home. I would try to assure her that’d never happen.. I’d always be there to take care of her, and I’d never let anyone put her in a nursing home.. even in her old age. It’d always been her and me, ever since my dad died.

    After over a year of treatment.. she finally had to leave work on disability. She had some money saved, but over the years after her “retirement” she used that to cover extra bills, and help her kids out of binds *mostly my brother I’ve spoken about many times in the past*. I had been trying to figure out a way I could make more money so I could take care of her for once.. I never really managed it. And for that I’ll always be sorry.

    My mom had been stressing this past year, knowing that when she turned 65 in Janurary, she’d stop recieving her disability… and she’d be living of a tiny social security check, she’d not be able to afford even half of her medication. *she took over $600 a month in medication*… she was TERRORFIED of not being able to buy food/pay the electric. What little money I made wouldn’t allow me to cover everything. The week prior to my mom’s accident we’d been discussing ways of getting me out into a better job.. getting the help I needed to get out in the “real world”. I was feeling very positive about it, and thinking “this is good.. it’s a good time, I have a lot of things I care about in my life, and being able to help my mom is good incentive” Then … in the freakest of accidents.. my mom, is gone. My mom had very good luck… and a lot of bad luck. Falling asleep or losing control of your car and hitting a deep ditch and light poll in it.. less than 100 yards from your home.. a place where you should be slowing down anyway … is.. I dunnno. It’s beyond bad luck, I think.. it’s fate perhaps. Maybe she used up all her good luck, her outs.