My Mother Mary

She was just like any other woman I knew, strong, assertive and independent. I started to notice-after three month of me being with her- that these qualities could be strong at times and weak at times. We did not talk a lot, but I was very keen and so I was able to understand mother. It was rocky at first, after 11 years of me living away from her, things were a little hard to get back on track...I was too young when she left to ever understand what it was like before she did, I just knew that I wanted to be with her so I could know her. She left when I was five and again when I was six..."I want a better life for you" she would say when I asked why she had to leave me. I wanted nothing else than to be with her so at the time that statement had seemed just as bad as blaspheme. I got a phone call every Saturday nights and on special days…I got a barrel every Christmas and greeting cards on special dates. But it would have been the same had I not been receiving all these things. When I moved to America to be with Mother and to attend a collage I had been accepted to, I thought that it would have been easy for me to live, everything at my finger tips and everything just the way I wanted it to be...after all 'This is America' I was proved wrong, in fact it was just opposite of what I had expected, I had very few clothes and very little money to buy new ones. mother was working most of the time and I was left to make a woman out of what little experience I had, I knew nothing about cooking or emergency alerts or even crossing streets confidently...I knew nothing, but the fact that I was a child blessed and given to God, as said by my aunt who raised me. She was a Christian and so was I. I wanted to believe that God would keep me safe, But I also wanted to believe that I would keep him, I knew that would not happen so I ran, my Christianity is not the only thing that was crumbling beneath me...my entire life did, By my second semester in school I lost my only friend, but not to death. Now I was thrust out into the wild to be more confident and stronger, They say that whatever doesn't break you makes you stronger, I did not know what this would do to me and I still don’t know, the further into the semester it went the more serious it got. With Mother I had seen where our life was going we got used to each other too quickly after we were away from each other for so long. I was beginning to show signs of culture shock and depression. Being a small town girl it became extremely hard for me to cope in such hostile city as New York, I knew what my life was becoming...a pathetic, weak story that had finished its course and is now forgotten. Meanwhile my family and friends at Jamaica were 100% behind me, pushing me and motivating me. But it still was not enough to keep my head above water. I may have been more selfish than I originally thought I was, being in a new environment has always forced one to notice their true form, while I was focusing on my problems I had neglected to note how hard things had been for mother, she was slipping through the finger's of fate like grains of sand, with weakness fragility and vulnerability, and here I was worrying only about me. Tuition got harder to pay for the second semester; unlike the first we were unable to pay at once it took the whole semester- a whole six months- before mother was able to pay off my tuition. Had I planned for collage, I might have been able to lighten the burden that mother had to bear. Several evenings she came home, tired, I would be sitting in the room and wouldn't talk to her. And then there were times when mother did not feel like talking. I started to notice that things were heading downhill -quickly, thunderous and disastrous- I had been staying home from school, for a week. When she came home one afternoon she only started to complain how dirty the house is and why don’t I clean it..."I don’t know where u get this nastiness from I am not this nasty!" she said in anger "well maybe I didn't get it from you maybe my father was nasty" I answered. these arguments grew and grew, until they were impossible to control, soon mother would be in and out of our apartment without saying a word to me...we stopped talking, I was too proud to compromise and she seemed not to care, I started smoking, I stayed in the house more and I started to cut myself. And mother became suicidal. We were doing things we were never known to do, we were know to be genuinely nice people who are very calm and quiet, the males in our family(what little we had) were all mother's brothers they were a vengeful but not violent, they were calm, just like the ladies, My mother had no sisters she was the only female and she was cherished, so when she attempted suicide for the first time, I was blamed, In some ways I was OK with that, on the second occasion though I began to think that my mother might have been doing this to spite me so that I could be blamed for ruining her life. Less that 3 months later I was surprised to hear that she had done it again this time at work, we then realized what a menace life had really become to her and how serious she was about taking her life. we had thought of every possibility that might help mother relive her pains including an outer state mental institution...it never dawned on me that I might ask her what is wrong with her we only assumed that she had been stressed by sending me to collage. We could have acted faster, there might have been Government funds that would helped place her in an institution faster. We could not see any way that we might have been able to place mom in the institution we thought would have been the best for her.
Her brother had suggested I stay home with her, but I told him "Mary looks fine, she will be fine"- I had stopped calling her mother. I knew that I could not sit in the house and watch Mary all day; I might have gone crazy with her too. I needed a calling card so I could call my family in Jamaica and tell them that she is ok, do I went down to the street, I had been thinking for days of how my mother had changed from a strong, assertive woman, to this distant and seemingly dark Mary. In her depression she did not talk to me a lot. She was not crazy, she was just gone, and she would read and do every other thing except talk. When she looked at me...her eyes seemed empty as if all the love that used to fill the had been drained out...she seemed to hate me more and more...but I did not know exactly what she thought of me she just stared at me, with her dark empty eyes. I had bought what I wanted at the store and had been heading home. I pushed the door open and went into the room where the phone was. I did not see Mary there and didn't think much of it, I punched in the number that I saw on the phone card, then a second number and then the number of the person that I wanted to call, I talked for eight minutes, and the phone card expired. I went and took 1lb of frozen meat out of the freezer, it is only then that I realized Mary was nowhere in the apartment, not the bedroom, not the dining hall and not in the kitchen, there was only one other place that she might have been. My hearts started racing faster than it ever had, and my stomach had the most curdle feeling inside of it, my eyes started tearing and I yelped "Mommy!" I ran to the bathroom and kicked the door open- we had loosened the lock in anticipation of emergencies like this one- She knew exactly where the key to the medicine cabinet was kept, I was never smart enough to switch the designated location. There was an empty Advil bottle next to her hands; her head was propped up against the ledge of the shower. I closed the door calmly and called the police. Somehow I was more afraid of Mary killing herself than I was of seeing Mary lying lifelessly on the floor of the bath. I was more afraid of Mary killing herself than I was of loosing Mary.