This time of year is stressful for me. Holidays can be stressful on account of money and restricted time and figuring out where everyone’s going to be. Birthdays can be stressful because I never know which partner someone’s going to want to be with on their birthday or if they’re going to want to try to share it with everyone, somehow. Day-to-day life isn’t usually stressful for me but I’ve found instances where it can be.
Last night I got to celebrate Junk’s birthday with her family. We went to see her parents and we had a great dinner and she opened up her presents. Her mother gets her very nice gifts, the kinds of gifts a mother waits and waits to be able to give her child until they’re old enough to appreciate them. She buys her perfume and lotions and nice things for the kitchen for when she cooks. She gifts her with money so she can buy some things she really wants for herself and other thoughtful things. I’ve seen her give her clothes and enjoy watching her put them on. She loved seeing her in her make-up.
I got her a Rainbow Dash doll and she got socks and iron-on My Little Pony badges from Tiger. We got her the cute silly things because we know that side of her. That’s my relationship with her. That’s his relationship with her as well. We often joke, though it never is a joke, that he’s her step-mom. The mom she’s never really known. He’s maternal and caring and forever patient with her. He reinforces my rules for her, ensures she’s checking with me before doing something silly, and often stepping in to distract me before I realize she’s doing something she shouldn’t be, giving her that buffer of time to realize her mistake and to correct it. He has great empathy for her, great compersion for her, a great appreciation for who she is and the role she plays in my life. He found the perfect way to join the family without even trying, by just being himself, by complementing that missing piece.
Today I got to celebrate her real birthday with her. I got to wake up and give her a kiss and wish her a good day. I brought her home a flower, had dinner with her, ran errands with her. We worked on a project together and watched a kid’s movie together. I made sure to highlight our dynamic through some of our favorite play and then put her down for a nap before she had to break the game and join the real world of work and finding a new place to live and everyday stresses.
Tomorrow I face the anniversary of the worst day of my life. This year it’s worse for no good reason except that perhaps when it happened it occurred on a Friday and is again falling on a Friday. Some years I handle it better than others. Some years I can just be happy and make it through the day. Other years, like this one, I spend the day in regret which is not my normal self. Normally I can accept the things I cannot change and move on. In almost aspect of my life, when something is completely out of my control, it doesn’t even enter my mind, cause me stress, or induce anxiety. This is completely within my control. I could just let go and move on and never experience a day like this again but for some reason I can’t.
A year out of high school and fresh into the world of living on my own I was struggling. I was living with someone I loved. I wasn’t in love with him, as the saying goes, but we cared enough about one another that we lived together and took care of one another and eventually wed. At the time we were living in a garage that someone had converted into an apartment when his daughter needed somewhere to live. She wasn’t occupying it and we were willing to pay so that’s where we lived for a year.
We were poor. We had enough money to eat but we had to get food from the food bank to supplement us most weeks. We could pay our bills, mostly. I’d just gotten a job after a major surgery I had and was having issues adjusting to that, to the level of physical activity that it required after I’d spent so many years not being able to be physical at all. We couldn’t afford anything extra, not even the gas money to go and to see my family who lived 15 and 20 miles away. I didn’t see a lot of my family that year but we weren’t on the best of terms anyhow.
That Friday before Mother’s Day my grandma called me and asked if I had my Dad’s number. Years ago that wouldn’t have been a big deal but my grandma and my dad hadn’t spoken in at least a couple of years. Not willingly anyhow. A couple of hours later my Dad called and said he wanted everyone at his house at 4 and he didn’t care how we got there. It wasn’t like him to organize anything for Mother’s Day, especially since he’d spent so much time telling us how much he hated our mom and how he was so much happier with his new girlfriend. He didn’t often take that tone with any of us though and so I was inclined to oblige.
When I got to his house all my siblings were there, which was unusual — it wasn’t his weekend. We sat around joking about how mom was going to kill him when she found out he’d taken the kids out of school. He was a schemer though, so maybe this was his way of getting her to where we were so we could celebrate with him. There was tension, but we were ignoring it. The phone was ringing, but we were told to not mind it. Don’t even answer it, it was no one important.
We sat around for an hour or two, enjoying the company of one another, snacking. My dad’s cell phone rang and he was nowhere to be found. I picked it up and took it outside to him because while he said it was no one important, I knew it was. Otherwise he wouldn’t be on the phone so much. I saw him with my stepdad. In that instant, my whole world collapsed. There was only one reason in this whole wide world why the two would be standing face-to-face speaking instead of throwing punches at one another.
I also knew in that instant that I couldn’t say anything. I went back in and heard the peals of laughter from my siblings and suddenly it made me sick. I was angry my dad let us sit here having fun this whole time. I was enraged that we’d been here so long in the first place. Then my grandparents showed up. All I remember then was that as the four of them stood in the room, all the laughter died. All the color drained from the world. All the crying, from all the people I never saw cry, began.
That was the last day we were a family. Everything that happened after they broke the news tore every one of us apart in ways we never even knew could happen. No one could have ever prepared me for how difficult that transition could be.
Each of us carries our own guilt. My sister got in a fight with our Mom that very morning before she went to school. Another hadn’t spent enough time with her. My brother hadn’t been nice to her. The other didn’t tell her that he loved her.
My guilt is this: Thursday evening it was tradition for my mom, my grandmother, and I, all living in separate houses, to watch ER. The episode that aired that Thursday night was the one where Dr. Greene finally passed away in his home. The song that played during that episode still haunts me to this day. After the show, after I stopped bawling, I wanted to call my mom. I thought of a very important question I needed to ask her: When you pass away, do you want to be buried or cremated? It was important to know. But it was late and I knew she got up much earlier than I did. I figured I’d ask her tomorrow when we finally discussed it.
The question that no one could seem to answer as we sat together in that living room crying was whether she wanted to be buried or cremated.