ABCs of Thanking My Mom

Mother, I am grateful to you for:

a)      …allowing me to live, and stay in the family; and become part of a new one.

b)      …behaving badly so I might have a basis of comparison.  Also, being the first and fiercest fracturer of my mind and allowing your sisters to run loose on me.  Without the fractures of my mind, I couldn’t possibly hold all the DIFFERENT, sometimes CONFLICTING, perspectives and interests that my mind seems to have an endless capacity to hold.

c)      …calling me every name in the book, (and then some), so I can know how it feels when I do it to someone else –for them and for me.

d)      …denying me acknowledgement, or validation; I have learned to nurture myself well, and recognize the true value of discovering Self acknowledgement and validation.

e)      …estranging my sister, brother and I; it has allowed me to find my own way, and my own truths and convictions.

f)      …finding her own way, independent of familial input; it helped me find my own context.

g)      …giving up on motherhood.  Just like my sister, who knew she had little with which to draw upon, for the performance of motherhood, my mother pretty much kept out of our lives and who are we to say it wasn’t for the same reasons – to protect us from herself and vice-a-versa.

h)      …helping me to be prepared for the ugly in the world and making it possible for me to experience appreciation for its’ opposite and having a big enough scale to identify where I can exist, comfortably between the extremes.

i)        …identifying many of my “flaws” and “weaknesses”.  This taught me to be self observant, objective, analytical and critical, and watch for the same in others.  It has also taught me to recognize different ways that “flaws” and “weaknesses” manifest, effect, and are recognized and dealt with by others as well as myself.  These are skills I cherish.

j)          …James Muril, Babette Denise, James Drew, and by default, Sherrye, and Brock LaPlant, and Lisa Gay Holley.  You allowed my dad to adopt me, thus, making me legitimate – LITERALLY!

k)      …kissing me sometimes; I don’t remember clearly any specific time, nor do I remember it happening often, but somehow, I do remember that you did.  Granny said that she never remembered her mother kissing , or hugging her until she was 19 and left home to get married.  When I asked your sister Carron, whether your mother looked down her nose at you guys, like she did her grand kids, she said, “Look down her nose???, she looked right through us”.  That was sad.

l)        …loving me the best way you knew how.  I do believe, contrary to family opinion, that you did love your children.  I’ve pondered it more than anyone, other than you possibly, whether you loved us, and more specifically, me.  Babs and Drew had the impression that you didn’t have a capacity for love of other than yourself.  I don’t see it that way.  I know your best defense was to deny anything that you felt was a weakness or was painful.  That’s how I know you loved me; I know you had strong and conflicting feelings about me to the point it made you literally sick. I am sad that I didn’t get to share with you what I share with my own daughter(s) and my son.

m)    …marrying Cal; he was a tremendous influence on your children.  He gave us a sense of expectable discipline and an unfathomable thirst for knowledge, and the skills to quench our thirst.  Camp Harvey West was an experience your kids would not have had without him.  We all cherished our experience of living in a Boy Scout camp in the Sierras of Northern California for our first summer in Cali

n)      …not babying or coddling me and learning me to stand on my own two feet and defend myself and to keep getting back up and consequently learning me to duck and cover for that which is inescapable, honing my manipulative and coercive abilities and skills for that which is escapable, and by consistently demanding me to “Think Michael”,  you programmed me for quick identification, assessment,  and analysis of any given situation or condition that is of consequence to me or anyone of my concern.

o)      .

p)      …praising me for having more tenacity than any one you knew.  Praising me, and being proud of me for my brief modeling career, and even briefer acting career, allowed me to understand the feelings of accomplishment and recognition, as well as the sparkling feeling of inspiring pride from/within your parent.  I gave that to my children because I wanted them to experience that with me, their “Mother”.  I would so much have loved to share more of that with you, it’s been an awesome 30 something years of sharing that with first my kids, then other kids, and now my grand kids.

q)      …questions.  I understand the nature of me, my environment, humanity, and existence, and self vs. other. I have wallowed in -ologies, (i.e., psych-, physi-, the-, neur-, and an untold number of other –ologies),  -ics, (phys-, psych-, econom-, mathemat-, along with another untold number of –ics), and I have indulged my curiosity ‘til I’m a down-right glutton for knowledge, data, input! It gives me zest for life – I love searching for answers and the more data I process, the more I seem to grasp natures of things. Thank you.

r)      .

s)      .

t)      …taste refinement.  I was born a hillbilly and I’ll die a hillbilly, and I am honored by, and proud of the fact of it.  But through you and your California family, I would never have known what it was like to be anything other than a hillbilly.  You gave us awarenesses of, and appreciation for lifestyles and cultures other than our own; we learned new and various  culinary tastes and skills, learned more sophisticated ways of thinking, and behaving, we got awareness of the arts, music, dance, and ummm, social manipulation.

u)      …uniqueness of character and courage to express my life to its potentials.  People tend to express an appreciation of Me and I think that is because I want to see everyone get to experience that feeling that comes with enlightenment, discovery, and new awarenesses whether it is with self, other(s), or a situation or occurrence.  I am driven to steer others to different doorways of thought through which to consider some issue that seems to me in beehovance to that other. <mangled sentence>

v)      …verbosity, variety, viciousness, and even vanity too.  Verbosity was my self-defense until I went overboard verbally.  I’ve learned to be very careful, and thoughtful to gauge who I am talking to, and their degree or lack of verbosity.  The variety you introduced into our lives gave us a taste for, and courage to, experience variety in all aspects of our lives.  The quality of viciousness has always given me a feeling of profound power enabling me to deal with whatever life decides to throw me.  As I have aged, I have learned an even more profound power in discovering and cultivating the opposite of viciousness, gentleness.  As you taught me, without one, the other becomes meaningless.  Last and hopefully least, vanity, it has allowed me to learn selflessness.  Thank you.

w)    …wonder

x)      …x

y)      …y

z)      …z