My mother. 
Mommy, that is what I remember calling her.  Of course, I was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6...and then, suddenly, 7.  And then I didn't call her mommy anymore.  In fact, nobody ever talked about her in my presence at all, really, not after her funeral.  "Your mom," or "Patty", maybe.  But never again just mommy.  

I don't remember a whole lot about the day of her funeral or the few days that came before it.  My world, it felt, resembled nothing more than the stark surprise of the mean trick you see catty, tuxedo-clad waiters doing in a Saturday morning cartoon.  You know, that trick they do where they quick! snap a tablecloth out from under dishes on a beautifully set table.  In those cartoon scenarios, the crystal vase would tremble but never toppled over or plummeted to its death onto the floor.  The china, in all its drawn-out and illustrated glory, gyrated and danced in a suggestive manner at the possibility of breaking, but never did!  Instead, after the whip-snap of the table linen, it would all settle down back into position and just be fine again, like there was never any upheaval, never any distress.  Of course.  But that was a Saturday morning cartoon.  

The life-blinding changes that would play out over the course of the next four or five months, I don't know if anyone could have predicted how it all would go.  I certainly had no say in anything, and I never understood why, ESPECIALLY considering the fact that exactly 1 week before the day my mother died she looked at me seriously and said she needed to ask me something very important.

I do remember feeling alarmed by the look in her eyes.  Scared.  Sad, too.  And you know something?  Some of that sadness has never even left me.  I carry it 'round and it sneaks up on me.  I can be lying on the carpet on my side, reading, and have to stop and stare into space for awhile.  As a little girl, I could be playing ball with friends or hula hooping outside under that huge old pine and have to stop and just cry.  That is how sadness is, insisting on a place inside of you, but never quite cooperating.  

"Baby?  Hey."  She touched my chin with her soft, small hands and tilted back my head so that she could count my freckles.

"What, mommy?"  Her eyes were wide.  I blinked.  I sensed that she felt scared, too.  That made us the team we were, knowing each other on that level in such a way as this.  

"If something were to happen to me...where would you want to live?"  Her eyes were full of indescribable regret.  Sorrowful.  

My eyes filled.  "NOT with Rose and Bruce!!" I declared.  They were my aunt and uncle.  They already had 3 kids of their very own.  Besides, my Aunt Rose made everybody get up and clean the damn house Every Saturday Morning before anybody was allowed to scatter for the day.  I mean, what a drag!  I KNEW I didn't want to live at THAT house.  They already had kids; there would be no love left over for me, I just knew it!  Oh, please.  NOT with Rose and Bruce!  

I began to cry like the 7-year-old baby that I was, and threw myself into her.  I buried my face in her chest as she hugged me ever so tightly.  I stared at the lone purple wall in her bedroom.  Just one purple wall, and it served as the backdrop to her ginormous Serta and all those pillows and fancy bed linens.  Purple, the color of royalty, nobility, luxury, power, and ambition...Of wealth, extravagance, creativity, wisdom, dignity, grandeur, devotion, peace, pride, mystery, independence, and magic.  Perhaps I am biased, but when I think of purple, I think of that loud, intrusive wall... and of old bruises.  

She cried with me that Friday night.  We sat there, on her bed, and I tried to memorize how she rocked me back and forth.  I tried to remember the way she smelled that day, but I have long since forgotten, but my memory evokes this hybrid of lavender and good leather.  L'Occitane and new car.  That's how she was, though...beautiful but wrecked all at the same damned time.  

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My mother has been dead now for 34 years this week.  I have let myself forget which day she died, though.  I think about it every day.  I mean, how could I have forgotten?  When I nearly drive myself nuts about it, I will drive out to her grave in Childers, Oklahoma, the Ball Cemetery, and look at her headstone.  Then I remember again for awhile, that exact date.  I only drive out there once every 4 or 5 years, though.  I do not  decorate it for Memorial Day mainly because I do not want to fumble for answers to questions posited to me by my very own three babies.  I don't have any real answers for them, anyway.  And I sure don't want to hang my head and sob in the presence of every other Memorial Day cemetery visitor.  When I go there, I always wish to be alone with myself.  Sometimes I talk to her there, and sometimes I do not.  As an angst-ridden teenager, I would write letters and fold them into footballs, compact, and put them on her stone fully believing the absurdity that somehow she knew the words I had written to her.  But I never wished to be around other people when I visited.  To be honest,  there simply isn't any amount of comforting by anyone other than her that will ever make anything about this, okay.  Losing the center of your entire universe just cannot be mended with love from anyone other than your mother.  It's ironic, too, that the only person who can fix it, just absolutely cannot fix it.  It's like another mean trick, only with this trick nothing settles back into anything recognizable and normal.  The hole that is left in your heart is just that, a hole, and we all know hearts do not regenerate like starfish and wounded skin.  It's just always there, gaping and wide and cavernous, echoing back only the sound of your own brokenheartedness.  

The night she killed herself, I was at Rose and Bruce's house.  She'd dropped me off that morning, and then bam! there it was, the heavy August evening.  I was there with my three cousins.  My Uncle Bruce was outside in the yard, probably burning a barrel of trash.  They lived in the country outside of Kellyville, and everybody burned their trash like you might expect at a ritual of plotting Boy Scouts.    The phone rang.  Amy, my cousin who happened to be my same age, 7, answered.  I was standing right beside her.  I had even been laughing until I saw the look in her eyes as she yelled at her sister to go get my uncle.  I could tell that something was bad wrong.    

A few hours later, Rose and Bruce brought me into their bedroom and closed the door.  I knew I was about to hear something bad, too.  I clutched Minnie tightly and breathed in the smell of her butter-yellow yarn hair.  Mmmm, baby powder.  My mother had stood on line at Toys 'R Us in the summer of 1984 to fight the masses in one of the best displays of all the modern-day showdowns of capitalist nations:  The release of early edition Cabbage Patch dolls.  She succeeded, too, and just like a warrior emerging from the fire came out wielding 3 dolls for 3 very fortunate little girls!  One for Amy, one for her sister, Shannon, and of course one for me.  Of course, she let me have first pick, and I chose the one who most resembled me:  Blonde-haired, pink- and puffy-cheeked, piggy tails and a bitchin' floral camp shirt with blue denim overalls, arms outstretched and eager for affection.  Amy and Shannon fought among themselves about the other two, and I was so elated that I never even heard a word!  I got to choose because my mom was the one who made the dolls even possible in the first place!  I am proud to say that my mother never left my cousins out of anything fun we ever did, and that was part of her generosity.  I like to think I inherited at least this from her, the joy in the little things that bring happiness to others.

"Honey, remember how your mom dropped you off earlier today?  Rose started.

"Yes," I said, this heart of mine stopping.

"Elizabeth...your mom isn't coming back," said Rose.  

I hesitated.  Then:  "What do you mean?  Does she want me to spend the night?"  I asked, begging and hopeful.  Always, I have been this prisoner of hope, and I put my finger on this moment in time right here.  With that question, I wanted nothing more than my hope I had in that VERY moment for that to be it.  Just...stay the night and I would see my mommy in the morning.  My hope right then was the tippy-top of a mountain, the highest elevation you could reach before your body couldn't take it anymore and you passed out.  My hopes couldn't reach up any higher than they were at that moment.  I hoped so hard that she would return to get me the next day.

"No, sweetie.  She isn't coming back, not ever."

I don't remember if I cried.  I honestly do not think I did.  I thought it was a sick joke, and I was the target.  I thought it was a dream.  Rose and Bruce stood up to leave the bedroom.  I don't remember anyone hugging me or letting me cry my eyes out about what unfortunate news I had just been given.  My aunt was never a fan of physical contact, anyway, so maybe it never occurred to her just how opposite of her I was where human touch was concerned.  I try to give her the benefit of the doubt in spite of myself.  In spite of how do you tell a child something like this and then just leave her there to figure it out?

Their boring, brown bedroom door closed quietly.  I didn't know what to do exactly.  I did not know how I was expected to respond.  I remember looking at that dolly, a gift from my mother just because.  That's what she did:  She'd just come up with surprises and nice things and trips and vacations and that was simply how we lived.  She went to Boston on business and brought me back a smiling doll who wore a lace bonnet.  And with another trip, she returned with a beautiful music box with praying children on top.  I still have it, actually.  A fragile piece, It is one of the few things that were returned to me that went unsold after they cleared out our house we lived in then in Jenks.  I keep it in my small curio with my beautiful Willow Tree figurines.  To this day when I look at it, I have to catch my breath.  

"We'll be okay, Minne," I insisted.  Ssssshhh....There, there...  I held my doll tightly to me and tried to rock her just as my mother had done with me exactly one week before the night she died.  I vowed that evening inside my own heart and my own brain that I would be fine.  Fine!  And every year in late August, I have to revisit that night and the lurid and intense events leading up to it with a heart full of the earnest realization that yes, this has actually been my life, and it does in fact play out like the plot of that play you've always wanted to see but haven't yet gotten around to, like procrastinated inclination.  Every late August, I recalculate the number of years I've been without her by hand and then for the next 364 days when someone asks me I am prepared with the right number, the right answer.  And I have to remind myself that after everything, I am a strong and good person.  In spite of all the mistakes, I'm still fine.  Flawed, but in a tragically complex way.  I think I am not alone in this, though.  We are all broken and flawed and damaged because life happens to everybody who breathes.  Circumstances come about.  Situations are created in which we take an active or passive part, and we all of us are in one constant state of beautiful transformation.  With that, my heart tries to be in the right place even though most days I want to dive right back into my bed and hide from everything just so nobody will see how scarred I truly feel, how unsure.  I'm barely getting through tomorrow, but I still refuse to let sorrow bring me way down.  Then, just like that, the last week in August is gone and I feel like I can rise up again and resume the positions I have to temporarily abandon every year around this time.  It is then that I can put back on all my hats, and for the next 11 months and 3 weeks, encourage myself back into schedules, routines, my self-drawn map of life that also includes the wrinkles thrown in by God here and there; crease marks only.  No rips.  God is good, and I pray I can remember to be thankful for the lessons he is continuing to show me.  And kind of like a hard candy Christmas, I choose to be thankful...even for the tough stuff.  

Hey, maybe I'll dye my hair
Maybe I'll move somewhere
Maybe I'll get a car

Maybe I'll drive so far
That I'll lose track
Me, I'll bounce right back
Maybe I'll sleep real late

Maybe I'll lose some weight
Maybe I'll clear my junk
Maybe I'll just get drunk on apple wine

Me, I'll be just
Fine and dandy
Lord it's like a hard candy Christmas
I'm barely getting through tomorrow
But still I won't let
Sorrow bring me way down

I'll be fine and dandy
Lord it's like a hard candy Christmas
I'm barely getting through tomorrow
But still I won't let
Sorrow get me way down

Hey, maybe I'll learn to sew
Maybe I'll just lie low
Maybe I'll hit the bars
Maybe I'll count the stars until dawn
Me, I will go on

Maybe I'll settle down
Maybe I'll just leave town
Maybe I'll have some fun
Maybe I'll meet someone
And make him mine
Me, I'll be just

Fine and dandy
Lord it's like a hard candy Christmas
I'm barely getting through tomorrow
But still I won't let
Sorrow bring me way down

I'll be fine and dandy
Lord it's like a hard candy Christmas
I'm barely getting through tomorrow
But still I won't let
Sorrow bring me way down

I'll be fine and dandy
Lord it's like a hard candy Christmas
I'm barely getting through tomorrow
But still I won't let
Sorrow bring me way down

'Cause I'll be fine
(I'll be fine)
Oh, I'll be fine

For as long as I can remember, I have loved the nighttime.  As a child, yes, and now even more as an adult.  When the sun tucks itself in just to the west and the moon rises in its place, I feel my very best.  Satisfaction washes over me like warm water.  I get giddy, almost loopy, and something inside of my brain clicks and clicks like the the wheel immediately before the Showcase Showdown.  Click click click click click...I can feel the happy vibration within me as I make dinner, fold a basket of laundry, feed these kids, do baths and jammies, and prepare my family for bedtime.  The Witching Hour, I have been known to call it, only because my click click clicking induces anxiety, and of course that is the part of the whole 24 hours when all hell seems to break loose.  People have meltdowns over foods they either do or do not want to eat.  People lose their minds over spills.  People get cold and think they need blankets at the dinner table, and Kindles, and stuffed animals, and toy firetrucks, and those miserable Wonderloom rubber bands, too.  If it's not one thing, it's another.  And if one kid is melting down now, then calms down, good.  But you can bet dollars to donuts that in 5 minutes, another child will proceed to have a conniption fit about something as dumb as the wind blowing in the wrong direction.  Yeah...and I am not kidding.

The only saving grace I have at that point in the day is to just keep my internal stopwatch on the ready, and repeat this on loop in my brain:  It's almost their bedtime...almost bedtime...almost bedtime.   

One of these days, I am going to really regret wishing my time away.  These nights that are a struggle, I know I am going to miss them some day in the future.  I must learn to be more self-regulating in my dealings with my family.  After all, they need and deserve the best version of their mother, not some panic-stricken control freak trying to chop!chop! keep everyone on some semblance of a schedule.  In reality, I'm just going through the motions and checking off a list as things fall into their natural order, all the while the nighttime like a a carrot on a stick, this huge, intangible thing I simply cannot catch and savor.  Maybe I DO look forward to the dark of night when I can be alone with myself to write, listen to music, and eat stuff I don't want to confess to eating, like Moon Pies and maybe some Reese cups.  But that's an entirely different conversation.

Anyway.

Yes, one day I will miss this chaos, and rather than abhorring it for the circus it seems now, I will trade it in for a sentiment of missing and appreciating it all for its beauty and the smiles I have had, or wish I would have let myself enjoy this all along.  I need to simply sllloowwww dowwwwn and realize this temporary state of noisy and complete whirlywind disorder is just that...temporary...but the little personalities I am helping to shape will last forever.  Wow.  Forever is so...indefinite.  Stretching for miles, the personal equivalent of looking out onto the horizon while right in the middle of the ocean.  If I continue on this path of handling my kids, they, too, will grow up with anxiety and a perpetual feeling that being still is the same as not doing anything constructive, and this very reason alone is a reason good enough for me to make an effort to change my habits, my role, in this whole thing, this horror show known as Parenting.  

I believe kids often mimic the things they see or hear.  I know mine do, anyway.  And I don't want them to be an indolent ball of nerves now, or ever, for that matter.  Therefore, I am going to make it a goal of mine to SLOW DOWN with my kids and try and be more nurturing.  I certainly don't want to enable any weaknesses, but I don't want to avoid their needs in such a concerted effort that I am too rushed to give them my love and attention.  

Yes.  Mommy is going to be like Night and Day, kids.  That's the way that I am.  When I see something within myself that bothers me, I do my very best to try and do better.  After all, being responsible for my kids' forever really IS a big responsibility in the grand scheme of things.  How I respond to my littles will affect how THEY respond to life.  It will affect their school and work careers.  It will color their outlook on this world in which we must survive.  My response to my children will play into the cycle, after all, and they will interact with and treat their children much in the same manner.  It will affect their relationships with their chosen companions.  I want my kids to have healthy coping skills and the kind of self-confidence and self-sufficiency that will enable them to be winners at life, not victims or creators of problems.  

Night and Day, dark and light, slow then fast and then slow again.  But loving them as best I can, all day.  I'm on the right path to even recognize there is a problem, and I am the only one who can change me.  

I am up for this challenge, and I will conquer it.  I will thank myself later for choosing to slow down.  I may have unfolded laundry and dirty floors (my current situation, ahem...) but at least my kids will know I am trying to make real time for them.  After all, kids don't want stuff.  They want their mothers to listen to them and take an active interest in what they are saying and doing, and not just rattle off some lame statement and send them on their way again.  Night and Day.  And the nighttime is NOW.