Pantsless Weirdo

Mom,

I’ve always thought that the “f” in “twelfth” was unnecessary. We don’t use an “f” in any of the other spellings, like tenth, eleventh, thirteenth, or thirtieth. I remember when I was little, the way you would lament the complexities of the English language.

“Shouldn’t we say you put your bewt on your fewt or your bʊt on your fʊt?” you’d say, beaming at your own cleverness. “I just feel bad for people who are trying to learn English because it must be so confusing.”

Despite being a poor Irish Catholic girl from southern Indiana, you somehow spoke Spanish and French beautifully in addition to speaking and writing English extremely well.

I want to say that I got my writing and speaking eloquence from you, but that’s not totally fair. My dad is also well spoken and an intelligent writer, which I suspect is part of what drew you to one another in the first place. That and your shared love of cheap beer.

In the year or two preceding your death, you reverted to speaking like you’d grown up inside a wet dumpster. When I’d call you on it the way you had corrected us as kids, you’d insist that it was your right to code switch however you wanted.

Anyway. I digress. I wander off and talk about things like how you spoke when you were alive because I don’t want to be reminded that you are dead. It’s been six years. I had just turned 29 years old when you died, a staggering reality that gets no less unbelievable no matter how old I get.

This year, I opted to focus on honoring your life with good things. I never know how to handle this day, or your birthday, or any of the other important grief dates in my life. Should I hide under the covers? Go through your stuff and reminisce? Cry all day?

You always said you didn’t visit graves because it’s just a body in the grave, so why bother? Given how you raised us, I have never felt all that comfortable at a gravesite after burial. “I ain’t there,” I can hear your voice say, defiance in your eyes as you dare me to correct your grammar.

Your grave is especially sad with barely a placard to say your name—so small it’s as if your life was a whisper. We can’t afford to buy you a real headstone, not yet, and going to that place where you are buried in your jammies and seeing that crooked fake metal placeholder makes me infinitely sadder than just… not.

So, this year I visited my sisters at their workplaces. I took them the Christmas gifts I forgot to give them in December from the little Jesus + sobriety shop that Michael and I visited on our way back to his place from the beach in South Laguna. I thought about you on that beach, how you waited almost 40 years to see the ocean and how it was such an important event in your life.

I took my sandals off and I dug my feet into the sand and my best friend helped me make long, boring videos of myself talking about silly nonsense for my kids who were back at home with their dad, all of them miserable.

I came home a day early from that trip, even though I needed the time away, because I was so wracked with guilt at how miserable they were without me. I shouldn’t have done that. But I’ve grown to realize that I learned it from you. You unwittingly socialized us in our formative years the same way that you had been socialized with what you learned from the women before you.

The message was clear, if unintentional: Put your needs last. And when you finally get around to focusing on your needs—forget about anything you might want—make sure you marinate in shame and self-loathing over your selfishness.

You had wanted to see the ocean your whole life, but we were so poor and there was just no way, even when we lived only 300 miles from the Georgia coast. You didn’t finally find a way until your youngest child was almost a teen, and even then the trip was raw and inexpensive, just you and your best friend in her beat-up car taking a quick jaunt down to Crescent Beach in her home state of Florida.

You sat down in the sand and cried when you finally saw the ocean. I imagine those tears came from a deep place of complex and conflicting feelings. You must have felt overwhelm at the sight of such majesty, created by the God to whom you sometimes had to fight to remain faithful. Sadness and loneliness around your broken relationships and feeling trapped with three kids and a three-jobs-at-minimum-wage income. Worry and fear about those kids who were back at home and who were relying on you to get us out of an abusive household.

And I wonder if you sat there thinking of your own mother, and how maybe she never got anywhere close to seeing the ocean and how you were only 23 when she died—six whole years younger than I was when I lost you. I wonder if you felt the same kind of sorrow for your mom that I feel for you, a deep ache at all the things she’d never get to do.

I hope that you’re somewhere near the ocean now, sitting in the sand, with the sun on your face instead of tears.