Second Sentences

I believe in hope and baseball. I wake each day hearing my grandmother's voice tell me, "this will be the day" or "this is your year". Of course my grandmother died before the bad years- after I married my first husband but before I became addicted to cocaine and oxycontins, before I wrote checks, before I killed my old life and found myself alone and in prison. My mother died while I was in prison.

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My mother used to say, "for the first 39 years of my life, nothing bad ever happened to me - and then my luck changed." When she was 39 my father left. I believed her for a long time. I thought my life was the opposite. I thought we were like mirror images and that where her luck ran out mine would begin. In fact her luck ran out long before my father left. I just don't think she understood it.

My mother was born in 1932, in New Haven, Connecticut. She was the youngest of 3 children - the second girl, the sweet good girl, the little red hen. She was the easy child, the one with good grades who helped around the house.

The life my mother should have had was one of grace and charm and joy. She should have been everything she wanted to be - mostly she should have been loved. Instead, she was so busy pleasing everyone else that she never pleased herself.

My mother was the little girl with red curly hair and glasses. She was chubby and freckled but not fat. "You would be my girlfriend if you weren't so fat," Manny Botwin told her when she was in 6th grade." "Didn't that make you feel bad?" I asked her. "No," she said, "because it was true." She started to smoke cigarettes in college. That was when she thinned down.

My mother went to Smith; being jewish at Smith was being in the minority in 1950. She had her small group of friends at Morrow House. She studied government, went on dates; her life just moved along. "I wanted to go to law school," my mother told me, "but my father told me it wasn't necessary for a woman to go to law school," Instead, my mother was introduced to my father on a blind date. My father was a lawyer.

My mother and father should have been happy together. They should still be married to each other and everything should have gone down a different path. But my parents are both dead and I spent 2 years in jail.