My kids are watching the Sponge Bob Square Pants movie in French.  My hell is complete.

I understand it now.  My mother was an odd type.  I loved her dearly, as did most people who met her, but there was no denying that sometimes the rudder on her boat wasn't quite breaking the water's surface.

Every now and then, we'd be sitting with Mom in the living room watching TV or even having a conversation with her and she'd just out of the blue say, "I'm in hell.  I'm just in total hell."  Except when she said it, it was a two syllable word, "hay-ell."  Then she'd go back to whatever it was she was doing with no elaboration or discussion about being in hay-ell. 

My mom was an incredible seamstress.  My dad once bragged that if he needed a new transmission for the car, all he had to do was describe it to Mom, give her an hour and she'd whip one up on her sewing machine.  She made all of my clothes until I was around 14 or so, when I got my first pair of jeans.  Until then, I wore whatever she made for me.  She definitely had different ideas of what a young girl should be wearing than did the fashion industry of the time.  Skirts and knee socks (we did get to buy the knee socks) were my usual uniform.  I think I actually still have a photo of me in my beloved jeans and store bought shirt and pea coat.  Let's see:

(shuffle, shuffle)

Yep, I do.  That smile stayed on my face for a while after I got those Goodwill Store jeans!

That camper in the background was my father's pride and joy.  It normally sat atop that Ford Ranger also in the background, his other pride and joy.  He would introduce his truck and camper to people before he'd introduce them to his family. 

I remember once when I was about 12, my bestest buddy, Delena (my cousin for whom my daughter was named) and I spent the night in that camper, one of many although this one would be the last.  The camper had a propane stove made into it, as well as an ice box (as opposed to a refrigerator) and a table with cushioned benches that lowered down into a full sized bed.  We'd been popping popcorn and drinking super market brand sodas and giggling like mad.  My dad had been teasing us about how he was going to come out there in the night and make sure we were treating his camper right, so we'd put the chain lock on the camper door to maintain our essential 12-year-old-girl privacy.  We'd just dozed off when we heard the door try to open and saw a man's hand trying to jerk the door open past the chain.  Knowing fully well my dad was making good on his word, we began squealing like little banshees and, being evil little pre-bitches that we were, we whacked at his hand with a little ball peen hammer he kept in the camper tool box and Delena popped him a few times with the staple gun.  We collapsed into rampant giggles and went to sleep, confident that we'd showed him we were NOT ones to be trifled with, nosiree.  When we stumbled out the next morning, feeling a guilty twinge, I asked Mom how Dad's hand was feeling and she looked at me puzzled.  Turns out Dad had gotten called into work (he was a night watchman at a coal mine) shortly after we'd gone into the camper for the night and hadn't gotten back from town yet.  (?!)  He came home shortly thereafter with two very healthy hands and two very panicked kids who didn't sleep in the camper again. 

Mom and Dad were funny together, although for most of the time that I knew them, they didn't really seem to like one another very much.  In my family, divorce was something that was not ever done.  The only reasonable excuse to divorce someone was physical abuse or rampant, serial adultery.  I only knew two divorces that happened in our family.  Mom had a pile of brothers and sisters... let me count... Lindley, Ann, Nell, Lou (my mom) & Sue (the twins), Jimmy, Betty and Patsy.  Mae, the oldest, died when she was around 9.  She broke her back by putting a ladder on a tire swing, causing her to fall in a freak accident.  Lindley and Jean, his first wife, divorced when I was a baby and it was Never Discussed Except In Hushed Tones.  My mom's family stayed close with Aunt Jean, so I have a feeling Uncle Lindley might have been the culprit in that one.  Aunt Patsy divorced Uncle George because he got mean when he drank, which was about every 7 seconds.  Other than that, nobody got to get a divorce.  Lindley married Aunt Jo shortly after the divorce (more grounds for potential dallying from Uncle Lindley).  Aunt Jo always thought she was better than the rest of us and was likely right.  Aunt Ann married Uncle Jim long before I was born and they were still married when he died in 2002.  Aunt Nell married Uncle Butch (who rivaled Uncle George in his mean drinking) and stayed married to him until he died around 1976 or so, then was on her own until she died in 2002.  Mom and Dad were married in 1960 and stayed married until he died in 1986.  She married Grover, my stepfather, in 1987 and he died around 1997 or so.  I only saw him a couple of times.  Uncle Jimmy was already married to Aunt Georgia (pronounced "Georgie" for as long as I ever heard it) when I was born in 1961 and still is (As a bit of trivia, my Aunt Georgia's sister was named Dean Wells and she was my mom's best friend. It took me a good 2 weeks to figure out why I was constantly mixing up the Dean family's mail with the Wells' family mail on my Grizzly Flats mail route until I remember why I associated those two names together).  Aunt Betty married Uncle Delmar (who was Uncle George's older brother) before I was born and they are still married.  I'm telling you, we have some staying power in my family when it comes to marriage.

As I said though, Mom and Dad were peculiar in their relationship.  It was very bi-polar and it seems like they loved and hated one another all at the same time.  In a rare moment of affection, I remember one time at breakfast, Dad came up and put his arms around Mom from the back and kissed her on the neck. We were all bug-eyed.  He said to her where we could hear, "You're just so sweet, I want to eat you up."  She asked, "Are you going to eat me whole?" and he said, "No, I'm going to spit that out."  I didn't get that until about 4 years later and I about fell on the floor laughing about it when I did.

Mom and Dad were both major drama queens and would howl and moan and decry their lot in life at the slightest little inconvenience.  To this day, I am extremely uncomfortable being around people who are given to hysteria and it breaks my heart whenever people tell me that I am that way.  It hasn't happened often that I've heard that, but when I do, it makes me crumble inside.  I try hard to be rational and not let my brain seize up and stop working in times of stress.  Sometimes, I have to literally step away from a situation and take deep breaths and think to find a way out of whatever drama is going on, but I do always try to not get frozen in emotion.  "Analysis is paralysis" is a phrase I use sometimes to get me moving when things get crazy.  Seeing Mom and Dad have breakdowns on a regular basis and fall into fits of extreme depression and verbal violence over the slightest little thing left me with my fill of drama for a lifetime and a severe aversion to hysteria.

I am not at all unsympathetic to their plights.  They had tough lives.  Dad was an abused and neglected child of a fundamentalist Christian minister.  This left him fairly tweaked, but then his situation was complicated by a length stint as an automobile body repairman who was claustrophobic.  As a result, he never wore a paint mask and years of lead-based paint sediment made him a little nuts.  Mom was a stay-at-home-mom who was a lifelong hypochondriac. Like me, Mom was short and plump and dark-haired, but her twin sister, born minutes after here and therefore, "the baby," was blonde-haired, blue eyed, thin and winsome.  Mom learned quickly that being ill got her attention and the whole time I knew her, she was afflicted with some kind of malady or another.  She hooked up with her favorite doctor in the 1970's and together, they embarked on a series of surgeries and medicinal regimens that kept them both happily co-dependent until she died in 2003.  I can't imagine how many houses her conditions bought for him.  The whole time I was growing up, more intensely from about age 10 on, my mother was either recovering from surgery, in the hospital having surgery or getting ready to go into the hospital to have more surgery.  In the end, it was actually the decades of medication that killed her at the age of 60.  They eventually eroded the lining of her stomach until it bled almost constantly.  She had to go on an outpatient basis and have her stomach lining cauterized every few weeks.  The last time it happened, something went wrong and she developed an infection afterwards and the infection became systemic and killed her.  She'd "died" so many times before that I stopped going back home when she was on her death bed.  She always came back.  This time, she didn't.

For Dad, it was a similar situation in that years of his own comfort behaviors killed him.  Dad was a meat and potatoes man and had bacon/ham/sausage/hamburger and eggs with toast or biscuits every morning for breakfast.  The idea of eating a bowl of cereal or oatmeal for breakfast was completely foreign to him. He had a full lunch every day and dinner always consisted of a meat, a potato or other starch, a vegetable and some bread.  I never knew macaroni and cheese was considered an entree until I left home.  At our house, it was always a side dish.  In 1986, he had a mild heart attack.  He weighed around 320-340 at the time and was 5'8" tall.  He was scheduled for a heart catherization on Monday and on Sunday, he sat up in bed, said, "My chest hurts" and was dead before his head hit the pillow.  My cousin, Billy, (son of Aunt Jean and her husband after she and Uncle Lindley broke up, Uncle Bill), who was an orderly at the hospital, did CPR on him, which actually ended up killing him faster because he had a ruptured ventricle.  The fatty deposits in his blood vessels had obscured to the point that his heart just burst.  He was 51.

A few days before his initial heart attack, Dad called to talk to me and said that his unemployment insurance was running out.  The coal company had laid off people and even though he was a master technician with General Motors for more than 20 years, he was unable to get work.  After a year on unemployment, it was going away and he saw no way he could take care of Mom and my two brothers.  When he called, I was on my way out to a GYN appointment that I'd waited months to get... a follow up on a suspicious pap smear that turned out to be nothing.  I told him I had to go, that I loved him and I'd call him back.  I never did and it was the last time I ever talked to him.  He literally died of a broken heart over not being able to take care of his family.

He died without income, without life insurance and without a will.  It was a nightmare.  Thinking maybe Mom had learned something from that experience, my brother (the one who isn't insane) and I were shocked when she died without income, without a will and without life insurance.  Since she'd considered herself at death's door for decades and promised us she'd taken care of everything, we figured she had.  She hadn't.  Another huge mess.  Thank God for my brother Eddie, who sorted it all out and paid for Mom's burial expenses out of his own pocket.  Eric was out of work at the time and we were pretty much destitute, so I was no help and my other brother worked his hardest to make the whole situation absolutely impossible, refusing to do anything at all to help out in any way. 

Mom's laugh was as quick as her tears.  She was loud and brassy and given to extreme exaggeration.  My Uncle Delmar used to say that if you wanted to know what really happened, divide what my mom said by about 3 and you'd be close.  Anything that happened to her would begin to grow incredibly as she told it and by the time she told 3-4 people (that's when she was just getting started), it was pretty far away from the seed of what really happened.  She didn't lie so much as believed it was different the more she told it.

My Dad was hopelessly paranoid, worried about "the authorities," although I don't think I ever once saw him break the law, even speeding.  I think the worst thing he ever did was to hoist me into the Goodwill Store drop box to look for clothes for us to wear.  Still, he was always convinced "the authorities" were after him.  I've always wondered what gave him that impression.

Mom and Dad were good people who would (and did) give the shirt off of their backs to people in need.  No matter how hard up we were, they always provided Christmas for a family they would adopt weeks in advance.  They'd buy baby dolls at yard sales and Mom would make clothes for them and fix their hair.  Dad would build wagons out of old lawnmower wheels and plywood.  They'd get a few extra oranges and hard candies and Mom would make homemade candy to share.  Mom continued that tradition until she died. 

My husband now probably makes more money in a year than my father made in his entire life.   Things were always tight for them.  With Mom and Dad's emotions so completely at the mercy of outside influence and whatever happened to befall them that day, we never knew what was going to happen at any minute.  Life could go from peaceful to battlefield in the blink of an eye.  When I went to sleep at night, I never knew if I would be awakened in the night by my father slapping me for some crime, real or imagined or if he'd come in at 3am and wake me up, wanting to talk about my day or what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I saw my mother this morning.  I won't go into the experiences I've had with her since her death, but this time, I saw her in the mirror.  She had a better haircut and her face wasn't as lifeworn, but there she was, pretending to be me.  I tried to feel good about it, but I just didn't.  I spent 2 hours today retaking a complete bitch of a medical transcriptionist test for a potential job and it just wore me out.  I forced my palms into my eye sockets until I saw fireworks behind my closed lids and tried to get my migraine to go away...begged it to give me just a few minutes relief.  Despite all of the blessings and joys I have in my life, I felt the strain of a really hard summer bearing down on me.  Last year, I employed the motto of "Demand more from yourself" and I did exactly that. I pushed further when I wanted to stop.  I made myself have experiences I could have easily rejected outright.  I forced my life to change in critical ways.  This summer that all imploded on me with too much to do, too many obligations to meet, not enough time, not enough energy, not enough patience and feeling as though I continually was getting reprimanded for all the ills of the world: mine, other people's, whatever.  On top of that, I now looked tired and haggard and defeated, just like my mom.  The tears squeezed out over the heels of my hands and I tried to push them back again.  I am old friends with tears.  I used to cry every single day without fail, not the delicate "girl" cry, but the ugly cry where you heave your chest into it and look like you got punched in the face afterwards.  I don't cry so much any more; just ran out of tears, I guess.  It's there now and then.  I shoved back the tears, took a deep breath and said aloud to no one in particular.  "I'm in hell.  Just in total hell."  Then I smiled and put on my happy face again and said, "Tra la" and typed some more.

The torch has been passed, I guess.

Be particular,