Yesterday I had a thought…I can either be upset because I didn’t have what I wanted or I can be grateful that I had what I needed.
Growing up I always felt jealous and insignificant because I didn’t have a family like everyone else. My mom was single, raising 3 daughters and a granddaughter alone, watching a son being completely submerged into street life, doing all that she could to keep a roof over our head and food on the table, all while dealing with her own issues on top of alcohol being more of a daily need instead of an option.
To add to her frustrations throw in one daughter who was in and out of prison, trapped in a horrible relationship and trying to escape through drug use. And then there was me…pregnant at fourteen and pretty much a replica of all that my mother was and didn’t want me to be…then multiply the demons inside her by at least a hundred when she decided that the only answer was to make me get an abortion.
Somehow over the years I never considered how all of this affected my mother emotionally. I only thought about her issues with alcohol and how I didn’t have the typical loving, affectionate mother that I thought my peers had.
But yesterday something turned…something changed. And I realized that my mother was incredibly strong. She could have gave up when she was beaten unconscious by my father or when she realized the struggle and lack that came with being a single mother. She could have gave up when she realized that she was an alcoholic or when she found out that one of her daughter’s had started smoking crack and that the other was fourteen and pregnant.
There were so many times when my mom could have chose to throw in the towel, but she didn’t. She was always a hard and faithful worker. She was at her last job for over fifteen years. No matter how many times we moved, we always had a roof over our head and a meal every night. My mother thought enough about me, us, to do whatever she had to do to keep us with shelter and more importantly with her.
I didn’t recognize that early on. I had to be important to my mom because she did everything she could to keep me cared for…she gave me what I needed and what she could… for that I am thankful.
It has been good for me to see things from a different perspective. For so long I focused on all that was wrong instead of the things that my mother tried so hard to get right. And it all came down to me making a choice…a choice to look at my life from a different angle and to be genuinely thankful for the view!