Queen of the Single Wide...Open Spaces

My childhood was not similar to most. My mother was divorced when I was three years old. My biological father disappeared and we found ourselves living in a house with holes in the floor and no heating and air conditioning in Lovelady, TX. Shortly after her divorce my Mom met the man I call my Daddy. He worked on a ranch called the Lazy P at the time, they got married about a year after they met and my Dad decided that he wanted to start and run an alligator farm. So, he and my uncle bought some property in Sugartown, Louisiana, put a couple of trailers on it and commenced to building these giant, tin, UFO shaped bins. This was maybe a year after my parents got married.

I remember that when we moved to the trailer it was right after a hurricane had come through the region, which basically made the property into a giant slush pit of mud. My mom, my Dad, my brother and I were all piled into my Dad's tiny pickup. We parked on the dirt road about half a mile away from our used trailer/new home. My mom donned some very stylish white knee high shrimping boots and slogged through the mud with my brother and I on her hip. The inside of the trailer was filthy, so we got down to work scrubbing the thing from top to bottom. There was a lot of dirt, someone else's dirty dishes still in the sink and a lovely pair of size 14 leopard print thong underwear in the bedroom.

I was sitting next to my BF yesterday on our ride back from his home in Pensacola and we were discussing all of this and for the first time I caught myself wondering what she must have been thinking standing there in this absolute squalor after just having escaped the house with no heat and air, here she was again. I know that my mom loves my dad. I have marveled at how strong their love actually is since I was old enough to know what love is. What I haven't thought about, what is new to me is this: There must have been doubt in her mind. She must have thought that she had dug herself into another hole of poverty. Another crappy hand, house, job (she was working at WalMart at the time.) How heartbreaking to try so hard to make things work. Did it cross her mind, standing there with someone else's size 14 underwear, that maybe love wasn't enough?

But, it was and this is how I know: She pulled those underwear out of the closet with her bright yellow plastic gloves a look of complete disgust on her face. My dad was standing behind her staring at the underwear with an equivalent look of total horror, but then...then, then...they started to laugh. Until tears were streaming down their faces and my brother and I were laughing too and we were a little patched together family just full of joy and hope and wonderful new beginnings in a used trailer that was stuck in the mud.

This is my family. We laugh in the face of underwear.

Mentor Me

I recently signed up with a program to be a mentor/big sister/friend to an effervescent, toootally hip 13 year old. Now, this young lady’s parents are both crack addicts, they have been in and out of her life…well, her whole life. She has been bounced back forth between her grandmother and her mother. Her father makes occasional appearances as well.

So, yesterday was our first sort of “bonding” time. We went and got ice cream. She was amazed by the number of toppings at Cold Stone. She is also very chatty and open about teachers, friends, boys, hobbies, etc. We talked about her ex-boyfriend (total jerk!) her friends, the pool, shopping, favorite colors (hers is blue) and in the midst of all this, she starts talking about her mother. We’re laughing and having a great time and she launches into this story about how “loaded” her mom is all the time and how one time she fell asleep in her cereal bowl. And here’s what floors me…my men tee is laughing about this as if it were the same topic as my favorite color. Its light, it’s normal. She’s doing her best to make lemonade out of her rotten lemons, and this breaks my heart, a little. More than anything, though, it amazes me and makes me want to be very careful with this fragile, impressionable, but amazingly resilient young person who is sitting in front of me with ice cream dripping down her chin and giggling like the school girl she is despite the absolute crappiness that fate/God/Whatever has dealt her.

This is magnificent to me and I don’t know what her life will be like in couple of years. I don’t know what bad or wonderful decisions she will make. I don’t know what paths she will follow, but I want her to do well and fall in love and work hard and learn to trust people again…and again…and again because that will always be an uphill battle. Life is filled with people who let you down, everyone knows that, but there also some rare souls that will lift you up. That offer a wall to lean against instead of a cliff to fall off of. I want to help her trust in that. I want so much for this spunky kid (after just an hour of talking to her!). This is new to me, to want the world for someone I barely know, but I do. I absolutely do.