Yes, It's Another Cliché Love Story

Part 4

My mom in all her awesomeness had one weakness, her family.

She was the black sheep and differed in opinion with all of them about almost everything under the sun.

When it came to religion, sexuality and mental health, she was always in one corner by herself. She believed in freedom of what to believe in or what not to believe in. She always said everyone had a right to love who they wanted to as long as it was consensual and didn’t infringe on the other person’s rights.

She had also tried to explain that it wasn’t just the people in mental asylums that suffered from mental health issues and that they weren’t all the same. It was a battle she fought mostly alone.

Her older brothers were homophobic bullies while her sister was a homophobic attention seeker. It was like they were intentionally sidelining her.

Nothing she said got through to them and often she was the one to back down. By often I mean all the time. I admired her resilience because she never agreed with them if she had a different opinion even if she knew she would be outnumbered and it was futile to reason with them.

The only reason I never got in that corner with her was because she had ordered me not to do it. She was okay being the outcast  but she never wanted me to go through what she was going through.

Whenever we had a family gathering (it was a tradition to meet as a family on the two major Christian holidays), she would eat at least two of her special cookies before we left the house. She would eat a few more throughout the day just to get her through. She would sometimes sleep all day to avoid dealing with them.

I didn’t blame her, she had demons of her own she was battling. Demon I assumed she had gotten used to living with. The ones she never told anyone about, not even me.

Sometimes during her reclusive phase, it felt like she was on the verge of being suicidal. I lived in fear of coming home and finding her gone. It wasn’t as if she’d harmed herself or anything but even the people who took their lives seldom declared it. I knew she had attempted it when she was ten, I'd overheard my uncles making fun of it one time.  I never told her that I knew about it and she never mentioned it.

Other than the demons only known to her, she had other demons in this world she was fighting.

Hearing her siblings talking about her, one would right to think that she was some sort of demon that just sprung up in their lives.

Growing up, I thought she was snobbish, proud and arrogant, words I almost always heard whenever they talked about her. Yes, she’d made it clear to me that she wasn’t the most social person in the world and had explained why we had to have that living arrangement but I was a kid then and I only believed in what I saw and what my uncles and aunt were saying was the truth.

She might have sensed it because when we started living together, she told me to have an open mind to everything and nothing on earth was set on stone. She also told me that in every decision everyone made, there was more than met the eyes so not to be quick to judge. Words I live by to this day.

It was during that time that I found out that yes, she was different from the people I had grown up with but different didn’t always mean bad. I also noticed how she would become withdrawn for no apparent reason but after a few days or weeks she would come out of it. She said that she had those depressive bouts but she handled them the best way she knew how without medication.

On the Easter to my twenty second birthday, we had a family gathering as usual. (I call them gatherings because they always took three to four days and all we did is eat, play and eat some more. With our help, our uncles would slaughter two or three goats, depending on how many people were around, to get us through those four days. The meat would either be roasted or cooked into different side dishes. That was it.)