The Grace of a Mother

Last week I had one of those life-changing, knock you off the post moments that change your perspective entirely. In one fell swoop. Like, suddenly I went from standing over here on the mountain to over there. Never thought much about over there before, or cared. My perspective changed, & so did I.

How? Easy.

Through a conversation between my mother & my boyfriend on the telephone, unlikely as it was.

I'd spent many years, well a couple decades, assuming my outlook was how it was.

It wasn't.

At all.

I thought my mom was weak. Grew to despise women who I perceived were, & rather quickly. I thought she was very unprotective of me & my siblings for living with my highly abusive father (as if there's a softly abusive kind).

Spent the years in a warm & fuzzy relationship with my dad. Not really. Only after years before that of him drinking. But for the most part, that's how it was. Cordial, distant. It was ok. But was it?

In this surprising phone call came the truths that knocked me off the box. She told my boyfriend, in very descriptive terms, how not weak at all she was.

Only I never realized it. Because... sometimes the ironic beauty in life is that there are some things a mother won't tell us. Out of grace and grace alone. I'd known that. But it still was enough to change my perspective from a to z once I learned this new & detailed information.

I knew & remember to this day how scary and loud it was to hear the arguing, violence. To see it with young, big, sensitive eyes that meticulously recorded the events as I percieved them.

As if it were yesterday, I clearly remember my very big built 6'2" dad peeling out of the driveway. His gold colored Grand Prix squealing, (he'd played high school & college football, so we always needed a big car). We were in the loveliest house in California. Or at least that's what I thought when I was five. My brother had just been born at Loma Linda hospital, and all the doctors & nurses liked me because I could both hold and comprehend their adult conversation. Contrast that with home life soon after my brother's birth in this house they'd just bought. Somewhere I somehow just knew that there was rape going on. Even though I definitely didn't have an adult word for it. All I knew is that my 5'2 " mom would be trying to feed the baby, & my dad would be just beyond mad. He often seemed all upset at nothing in particular. And the doors would slam, the furniture would crash, and I'd be scared to death when I heard my mom cry out different things like no. Stop...or the worst, please stop.

Turns out, everything really was happening just as I remembered it, but far worse. What I learned from my boyfriend corroborated my impressions to a tee.

Yes, my dad was a raging alcoholic who couldn't control his ego or temper.

in fact he came home drunk all the time. There were phone calls from women saying they'd slept with him (my words, not theirs). And very humiliatingly, while, during and after she was pregnant.

He would come home from those people and demand, well force is more like it - sex from my mother. Rape in other words. Several, several times all night long. Painfully. Humiliatingly.

And of course, she wanted to leave. She was a total foreigner to this country. Had been a stay home mom for just a few years. Barely understood the language, because even though English is a requirement in schools the world over, she had to drop out in the third grade to work as a maid. So, thanks to the man she met in my neat, clean-freak father, she actually went from being a maid to having one. And it was nice.

Till the ink dried on the marriage certificate.

I knew my dad was a self absorbed prick my whole life. I knew theirs was an abusive marriage. But I had only thought of it from my, the child's, perspective. And blamed her for not leaving. Little did I know, how many many times she'd thought of it, made a plan, and just plain wanted to.

What I didn't know was how cruelly he'd almost brainwashed her. The threats he made were life threatening. If she'd done anything, and I do mean anything, to hurt his reputation in the military, and God forbid cause him to have a stripe taken away, that would be it. The last thing she ever did.

She never did that, for her children. She imagined the four of us, two girls, a baby boy and her, on the streets, eating out of dumpsters, with nowhere to go.

And as I heard all these details and unfortunately much more, I couldn't help but rearrange my image of my mother.

She didn't leave, but instead took so many difficult and life threatening punches & beatings, for me. But "only" for 12 years. She didn't want our life taken, or her kids to be without a mother, for us.

And for that, despite having to rethink all these years that my now 67 year old father and I have spent - and all the talks we've had, my mother is now in my eyes one of the very bravest women I've ever known.

So all I can think of it now is simple. "Thank you."

The grace it took to not unleash all this on me while I was growing up and watching me act like I inherited my dad's temper must've taken an enormous amount of grace.

But that's what mothers do. It astounds me. How profound to change my whole paradigm so quickly. It retroactively hurts to think of all this. It makes everything I play back seem very different from how I thought it was. Good, because it should.

I'm sure I'll write more as I continue to absorb this. After all, I'm very new to standing over here, new perspective and all.