Inside Gigi's World

I know I keep saying this, it feels like a constant theme of most of my writing lately but it really has been a year. 

And I am not talking about the good ol’ calendar year—although the last few Januarys to Decembers have felt a bit like a shit show. But instead a calendar year that has run from April to April and then May to May and finally June to June. 

I guess technically it has been longer than a year, longer than the 300 and some odd days but June is where finality took place and new stories began to be written. 

Sadly, I have instinctually always known how this story would play out. With everything in me  I knew what the ending would be, I was just never able to envision what the aftermath would look like. And as much as I thought I was ready for it, I wasn’t because if we are being honest with each other here, who is ever happy when they were right about that kind of ending? 

I loved my mother. It feels strange to say that outloud for more reasons than just one. Each reason more complicated than the one before it. It feels strange to talk about my mother in the past even though that is where she is. She is never-changing there, not that she had changed all that much in her present anyways or at least not that I can remember. I tried hard to have a “normal” mother/daughter relationship with my mom, but what is normal? Her and I, neither one of us were ever “normal”, so how could I have ever expected a “normal” relationship. I guess “normal” is what I keep getting caught up on, overlooking what was more important in all of this…healthy, a healthy relationship would have been the better thing to have. 

In my youth I thought it was such an easy concept: a daughter that could come home to a house that was peaceful. A mother that didn’t mind being around her child, a mother that didn’t feel so resentful towards her life, blaming everyone else for her shortcomings. I thought about how my friends’ mothers would take them for lunch or they’d go on day trips together to fancy places like sidewalk-shopping on the busy streets of Northampton. I thought of how some of my friends could walk into their house and not be met with confrontation because their mother was trashed and looking for an argument and though I did have some friends who understood exactly what life was like for me, I never had to explain myself or be embarrassed because they knew what that felt like. I could never figure out why it wasn’t an easy concept for her, to be the mother that I envisioned she had, until I was older and realized she was exactly the mother she had. 

And then I grew older. I got tired of the lies and the arguments. I resented the fact that life just couldn’t be easy. I resented the fact that when I was at school I needed to act like a dutiful child, an act that had to be believable and then when I got home I had to be the adult in the house, tip-toeing around to make sure that I didn’t make her too angry, not because I was afraid of her but because I just wanted peace—something I still long for. 

Then I grew even older, even more resentful, angrier. My heart had hardened because I grew to understand that I was never going to know what it was like to have a relationship with my mother—at least not in the way I had hoped for. My tongue became sharp like hers. I no longer backed away from her. I told her “no”, nobody told her “no” which was one of the biggest problems. The adults in my life turned to me to be the handler of my mother which shattered what little bit of a relationship that we had. Where I should have been able to find comfort in my mother instead turned to me being her biggest adversary. 

Her addiction steadily increased. 

I knew more of my mother’s business than any child should know about their parents and if I am being honest, one of the biggest reasons was because I dealt with a lot of the same people that my mother did. Not typically by choice but when you live in a small, sick town, full of the same population for the duration of the lifetime you spent there, it is easy to have some kind of overlap. My mother was not discriminatory about who she bought drugs from and people were not discriminatory about who they sold those drugs to. 

What is a middle-aged school child supposed to do when she is getting picked on in school because her peers are selling drugs to her mother? And what is that child supposed to do when she tells the adults around her this and they do not believe her?

I grew older still and the older I grew the more insatiable her addictions became. 

I still tried to seek help for her while I was struggling and no one seemed to notice, or they acted like they didn’t. 

I became more bitter. My words were venom. Her actions were a disease that was not only destroying her but the people around her. I said things to my mother that no child should ever feel towards or say about her own mother. My mother did things that no parent should ever say or do to their child. The damage was irrevocably done. 

I had learned in my time on this earth, with my mother, that I never wanted to be anything like her. I had friends who admired their moms, I loathed mine. 

Time steadily moved forward. 

Then I became a mother myself. To a beautiful, healthy little boy. My whole world changed. My heart became lighter. The first time I held him, I realized that I would change the world, bend it at will with my bare hands for him. There was and still is literally nothing I wouldn’t do for my children. As my heart began to feel fuller, more put back together in some areas, in others it broke more because after I held my little boy for the first time I began to wonder why that feeling wasn’t enough for my mom. I began to wonder why she chose not to do better. 

Even while my children were little, she was actively in her addiction. 

My intentions here are not to bash my mother or make her out to be some kind of villain. Over the years my mother proved to be a better grandmother than she was a mother. Have you ever heard a woman say that she didn’t know the meaning of her life until she became a mother? Well, I just don’t believe that was her, all the evidence suggests different. But instead I believe my mother found more of her purpose when she became a grandmother. I had moments, even if briefly, that I could find small glimmers of redemption for my mother watching her with my children. She was still a very sick person though whether it was by her choice or not. No one was going to change that, not the people around her, not my father, not my children and most of all not me. 

Still, her addiction carried on…

I stopped trying to talk about it with people. 

I forced myself to stop hoping that she would change. 

And I settled myself snuggly into the thought that I would never know what it was like to have a mom, at least never in the way that I hoped for. 

* * * * *

In April of 2024, R. and I decided to go to a restaurant that we like eating at. What better way is there to celebrate two upcoming graduations—mine and his—and touring a college he was interested in than quarter-pinball-machine games and wings? And so we ate and we laughed and we fed quarters into games’ change slots. The weather was nice. I remember the sun was warm and bright, the air smelled fresh. 

My phone rang. 

It was my father, “Your mother took a fall the other day. She isn’t doing so good. She looks really yellow. The ambulance is coming to get her.”

“Let me know what happens.”

I told R. He asked me what it meant. I told him I didn’t know. 

The days that followed were a plethora of phone calls and more phone calls. Conversations with doctors and family members. She went from one hospital to the next, each new diagnosis from each new doctor worse than the previous; stroke, brain cancer, stomach cancer, spots on her liver, spots on her kidneys, organs failing, withdrawal…hepatitis C…end stage liver failure…cirrhosis. My mother was going to die. 

April turned into May and May turned into June and they were filled with more hospital visits and phone calls and people wanting to talk about their feelings. At one point I asked my husband why everyone else’s relationship with my mother also had to become my burden when my relationship with her was already burden enough. He replied, “ You’re good at being strong so everyone just expects that of you.” He wasn’t wrong. I could carry the weight of a hundred worlds on my shoulders, Lord only knows that I have, so what’s one more burden to carry. 

On June 30th, 2024, my mother took her last breath. 

* * * * *

There are certain moments in your life that change your brain chemistry:

Seeing the ocean for the first time.

Your first kiss.

Holding your child for the first time. 

The day you vow to give yourself to someone endlessly, for the rest of time. 

Searching for peace.

Finding Happiness. 

Watching your children grieve, feeling something that you cannot help them get through. 

Telling the doctors to let your mother die. 

Remembering that your mother’s last words to you were, “If you take me home, I promise I’ll eat so I’ll get better.”

Watching your son cry over your mother’s urn. 

* * * * *

Today would have been my mother & father’s 42nd wedding anniversary. 

The heat has been relentless. 

I am sitting in front of the air conditioner, writing, because it is Wednesday and, welp, I write on Wednesdays. 

I have been reflecting on the past year and where I normally have words, I find myself coming up short. I feel like the grief that I am unable to understand has my brain and creativity stunted. 

I was hoping that after my mother’s death I would finally have respite from the grips of her addictions but instead I find that my life is more consumed by it. Even my final project for school is based around addiction. Her vices still have rippling effects on my life that I never wanted nor ever had any say in. 

Next week my mother will have been dead for a whole year and so much has happened. There has been so much she has missed, even more than what her addiction made her miss and there is still more to come. 

Everyone is in different parts of their journey of grief, going through it alone, unwilling to talk to each other about it. I mostly think it’s because everyone is still angry. 

The most unexpected thing about my mother’s death is that for the first time I have been able to find the smallest sliver of forgiveness for her. The minute I realized my mom was not just my mom, that she was a person, a sick person, that she did not have all of the worlds problems figured out, that she was living her life for the first time too, was when I began to view my mother through my own views as a person—a wife, a mother, a daughter—I was able to accept that she needed help that she never received. And not because it wasn’t offered or not because she was unable to ask but instead because she never knew how to heal herself. She never learned how to love herself. And she never felt her worth enough to try to figure out how. She was scared. This isn’t to pass blame on to anyone else, the fault is her own.

I’ve spent most of my life trying to be the complete opposite of my mom. I was so busy trying to distance myself from everything that she was that I never noticed that I was. It was through her actions that I was able to heal and break cycles (okay, so maybe not all of them but I am a work-in-progress too). Anger and love can be a useful tool of motivation when it is placed in the right hands. I was able to become the person that I had longed to be so many moons ago, sitting in that brick apartment building, in that shit-small town. 

Since my mother’s death, I think about my own death alot. I wonder how my children will view me. Will they think I have somehow failed them, that their lives were trauma filled—God, I hate that word—or will they see me for the flawed human being that I was that loved them more than she ever loved herself? I guess I don’t know, maybe we aren’t supposed to. 

I think of my mother a lot, especially in the heat like this. When I was younger, that’s when we seemed to spend the most time together. Lazy days at the lake filled with sand buckets and shovels, sandwiches and juice boxes. Hot summer days spent at the pool, eating watermelon and corn on the cob, hotdogs with ketchup dripping off the bun and onto my shirt… and I smile. It feels a little easier remembering some of the good times now that I can spend less time being angry and that is a gift in itself. 

I’ve learned something as I have grown into an adult. Two things can be true at the same time. My mother loved me, I know that whole heartedly, the very best way that she knew how. But as it turns out, even in our best of intentions, that may not always be enough. You can not always like someone but still love them and on hot lazy days full of love and laughter, surrounded by the people you love, you can still think of a time when life felt hard and easy all at once, and you can miss your mom.