My Karma, My Judgement, My Life

Going to the doctor tonight for this cold that just won't quit.  I think I've gone into bronchitis.  When I'm sick, I spend too much time musing over things and...


I've been thinking about something my father told me about a year or so ago.

I had been talking about how I was afraid that I would die, like my Mom at 60 and it meant that I've already lived half my life.  He told me that I was going to live to be very old because I had honored him and my mother.

Funny thing though, I don't really feel as though I have.  I mean we can only do our best right?  Most days I don't feel like a "good person".  I am just an inherently flawed person who is seeking change.

Strict rules dictated most of my years so far, and while some of them have been beneficial many have created a certain fear within me.  I have a strong sense about how life should be lived, and I know I write a whole bunch about my Mom(who was NOT a saint) but she showed me how to live a clean life, how to be a mother someday, how to do the right thing and not lie.

Losing her is the most tragic thing that has happened to me so far.  But I remember her with LOVE.  I remember the things she taught me about God. Even as I grew older and decided to make my own rules about life, those initial character building lessons have stuck with me and hopefully will stick with me forever.

My mother never drank, smoked or did drugs.  She just wasn't into any of that.  She ate potato chips.  But my father was an alcoholic, weed and tobacco smoker.  Two extremes in life, and I've always feared of becoming one or the other.  My father was "more fun" at times than my Mom, but that was only because he didn't really care if other people picked up his slack.  He needed my Mom's straight edge ways to help keep his shit together.  He was more fun, but he had a problem.  And I've learned that life isn't just about having fun and laughs.

I also wonder if most addicts/alcoholics are just deeply wounded people who don't really like themselves or are just seriously depressed.

I've found that when people are living a deceptive way, they will do their best to over justify their actions.  They try to make it seem as though the person calling unsavory behavior to light is the one doing something wrong.   My father did this to my mother for years.  Told her that she didn't know how to have fun or let loose in life because she wasn't into drinking or smoking weed like he was.   He told her that she was judgmental too. 

I remember hearing these conversations(arguments) and thinking maybe they are both wrong.  Maybe she did need to let go and maybe he needed to accept that certain things bothered her conscience.

How often do we just assume someone is being judgmental when actually they just are afraid for us?

I know that I've experienced that with some people.   My father knew exactly how to deflect my Mom's concerns, and that is by turning it around and making it about her flaws. 

This weekend I realized how similar I am to my Mom.  For the past ten years, I've tried to NOT be similar to her.  To change my life in ways not to be alike...but I think I know why when she was dying she told people to talk to me, to ask Sarah because I knew what she wanted.

For a few years I felt as though I had failed my Mom, by not following in her footsteps.  She once said to me before I turned thirty, that she thought by now I would be married and have had a couple grandkids for her to enjoy.  When I was twenty-five she bought me a Norwegian sweater, she said that she pictured me drinking coffee in that sweater with two little ones.  Even though she knew that I probably can't have babies because of my PCOS, she always talked about it.  This broke my heart a bit.  When I found out that my brother and Pam were having Beatrix, I breathed a sigh of relief.  It took pressure off of me to give her a grandbaby.

And now I picture something that will never be.  My Mom wearing her Norwegian sweater with Beatrix or Crosby on her lap, reading a Jan Brett book to them.

Before she died, she told me that her saddest moment was knowing she wouldn't meet them and she said that she was sad knowing that she wasn't going to see what I would become.  She supported my dreams of being a writer.  But I hope that if someday, I do have babies(adopted or from my own body) that I will take all the things I learned by her mothering example and be that way for my own kids.