Vivid Imagination

Bulldog faith

Over the course of our lives we are continually learning, making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. We win some and lose some and we take all this knowledge that we acquire but where does it go? Does it stay with us always? There are some that say experience is better education than learning it from a textbook, and I can believe that is a true statement. Being a daydreamer, I have the creative mind without boundaries and the knowledge about things that no one could learn from any education. My mother, being a very quiet, humble person, lived a life of uncertainty. She never developed the confidence in herself to stand strong knowing that she was more than capable to do anything; never giving herself any positive credit for anything. Because my mother experienced so many different avenues in life some would guess that she was always searching for answers and never found happiness. She began to believe this in a sense because she was very easily led where people thought she should be.

When I came along, she was very nervous about being a mother, she was afraid I was going to break or that she wasn't ready to be a mother. My mom and dad had tried many times to have a child and it never worked out so my mother kind of looked at that as being a failure every time. She would always tell me that she felt like a failure to her parents. I gathered because when she did get attention, it was always about what she was doing wrong and the areas she needed to change to become a decent person. During her life she was on the water polo team, lacrosse team, played gymnastics (balanced beam, rings), in high school and received high honors in everyone of them. Then she received a Bachelors of science degree in physical education giving her a career as a gym teacher, then got her real estate license and worked for many years. She was a hippie who went to Woodstock, moved all over the country, experienced many different ways of life, many different colorful characters and won over everyone that she met by giving them a feeling of acceptance and love. But, if you were to ask her she did not do much with her life.

I believe with all my heart my mother suffered from depression, was a bit autistic and was also a maladaptive daydreamer. She was an only child like myself so play time was limited to herself and the fear of being abandoned was always the monster under the bed. My mother put all her faith in her spiritual life as she depended on God and was a true Christian. The faith in her religion was strong but she felt weak without the religion holding her up as a crutch. We all must be strong on our own before we can be a vessel of strength in representation for what we believe in.

As she grew more sick, I became more angry and I took it out on her. I couldn't help this and the fact that I had no control over it all was again something I put on the back burner. I quickly rejected any hints that strayed from facts about my mother's condition as I was fully aware of her faith. My impatience for it and her denying what was on paper just infuriated me. That in itself made me feel guilt as I was the last person to be judging someone who just was trusting God and being positive. I was unaware then that the fear I saw in my mother's eyes was not for herself but it was for me and how I was handling everything and would handle myself after she was gone. I had no other family, I was single again and she knew that my lifestyle was headed for a burn out; of course any parent would want to know that their kid is going to be okay. She also knew I suffered from abandonment and the guilt from what she felt when it happened to her.

Parents have a love that is greater than any emotion, any feeling, it is pure and protective, it is unapologetic, and unashamed. I will always hold my mother's love very close to my soul. I believe that God picked us and out to be in each other's lives. Even though she did not give birth to me, she was everything and more as the role of a mother.

A legacy is a flame inside that gets brighter and more powerful as you realize the value of who you are in the eyes of someone else. That someone else being a parent or a teacher, a guide that leads you to being your best and in return carrying that gift over to the next. This is part of the circle of life and you carry your flame to pass on to your children, or anyone that is looking for love, guidance, anything that they need in which they cannot find. There is one thing in my life that I have not gotten over that still haunts me to this day, I had promised myself I would be there with my mother when she died. I know in my heart that she did not want me there as she was protective of me. Like I said then when I reached an emotional overload I would check out and that was what I was afraid of doing. It was getting close as she was in the hospice house the last week of her life. They kept feeding her more morphine until the doctor pulled me aside and explained that she is hanging on for some reason and I needed to tell her it was ok to go. The hardest thing I ever did in my life was to tell my mother that it was ok to leave me and to pass on, that I would be alright.