To continue the tradition, Love Mom

I saw this copy of Interior Details while at Goodwill, earlier this week, and just couldn’t help wonder, “What’s the tradition?”

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I’ve been lucky in my life. It hasn’t been perfect, but I wouldn’t change it. People ask me all the time—therapists, doctors, friends, well-meaning but ignorant relative—if I wouldn’t rather be normal. And while my illness has its ups and downs, or rather its UPs and DOWNs, it’s also part of me and I’ve learned to love me. So no, Aunt Silvia, I wouldn’t rather be normal. What the hell is normal anyhow?

But challenge or not, I still know I’m lucky. I have so much that so many others in my place don’t. I have a strong support system. My parents and brother will be with me no matter what. Even when I push them away or to their limit, I know that. We’re not rich, but I appreciate that I’ll always be able to afford my doctors and medications, even when I don’t want them. And I have a mother that’s been there, seen it all before…and probably got the T-shirt, knowing her.

I inherited my particular mental health quirk from her side of the family, from her. And because she’s struggled too, she understands, even on the worst days. But more to the point, she recognized the signs of my condition early and got me to the people I needed, got me stable…mostly.

She also taught me her coping mechanisms. Coping is an intensely personal thing and what works for one person might not work for another. A lot of her ticks make no sense to me (Precious Moments are creepy. They just are.), but one, just one we share.

When I’m up, when I can’t sit still, when I have energy that I just have to burn, redecorating my room helps. It doesn’t cure me. Doesn’t fix me or even my rampant emotional state, but it gives me a momentary focus. She taught me this. For her, it was the living room. I was forever helping her move a couch growing up. But I get it now. I understand and I’m thankful.

When I was fifteen, she gave me a decorating budget. I couldn’t spend willy-nilly; I always understood that to be irresponsible with it meant I would lose it. So, I only let myself spend it when I really needed to. Or rather, the only time I gave in and spend it was when I lost control. But it was a limited damage. And it helped. It helps. It’s not 100%, but it’s something, a floating board in an ocean of chaos.

We colloquially, and with the certain awe-inspired appreciation of survivors, call it our shared tradition. And it is. It’s something we share, outside of the rest of the family, but inside our small injurious bubbles.

I’m twenty-two now and in my first apartment (with about a dozen roommates). This month I’ve gone full Goth Bunny, lots of black and pink. When she sees it, Mom will recognize that I’m in a good place. What do you think, will the bed fit over there, between the window and closet door?

Denise, on your 40th

I saw this mid-February, 2018. There is so much to ponder in it. Who is Moms? Or would it be who are the moms? It took me forever to recognize the B in Bristol and understand it wasn’t Poristol. But I thought there was a lot of love in it. 

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I wasn’t supposed to see my 40th birthday. I wasn’t supposed to see my twenty-fifth. “She has a malignant neoplasm,” that’s what the pinch-faced doctor looked right over my twelve-year-old head and told my mother. Her hand tightened on mine, like she thought someone might try to take me away right then. It didn’t get any better when he went on to clarify that it was acute myelogenous leukemia. I think she stopped breathing. It sounded to me like some sort of magic spell and I thought, “I’ve been cursed, obviously.”

Oh, and Pops was SO angry. Not at me, just in general. It was fear. I see that now. But he didn’t know how to be scared. So, he took it out on the nurses (who were wonderful) and doctors (who never learned to talk to me, the patient) but did their job all the same. They learned to tiptoe around him and we learned to send him on errands if we thought my cell-count update might not be a good one.

He was there to see me ring the bell at the end of treatment, and when I got my letter of remission, and to walk me down the isle, years later, which he confessed was a dream he thought he’d be denied. But he’s gone now. Heart attack got him, no bit of evil magic.

I thought Mom would follow, honestly. They’d been such a pair my whole life, alternatively bickering and preening for one another. I couldn’t imagine one without the other. But much like she had when she thought she’d loose her little girl, she bucked up, bought a condo in the Houston area that we affectionately call ‘The Bristol’ and got on with living. She always was the stronger of the two.

I try to remember that. My babies are teenagers now and my special peacock understands how to afraid, he won’t need to yell at anyone. But how do I tell them it’s back? I’ve not been to the doctors, but I’d know this particular magic in my bones anywhere and I’ve a world of work to do.

For my son, the artist

I took this picture of The Artist’s Way in Goodwill on February 21, 2018. I hope someone eventually took it home and loved and learned from it. Were they encouraged by this mother and her “son, the artist?”

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In 1996 Dave was a twenty-year-old sophomore at Webster University, getting his art degree, much to the chagrin of his parents. They’d tried to be supportive, if not openly encouraging, but feared he’d never have an actual paying job.

However, his first public piece—a mixed-media sculpture made of recycled styrofoam from the local burger joint and used condom wrappers, symbolizing the transience of the human experience—had just won an award. The Association for Women Faculty sponsored the event and interpreted the conglameration of boxed wrappers as a subtle condemnation of the commodification of female sexuality. Meaning, after-all, is in the eye of the beholder. Dave was more than willing to go along with the idea. It would impress his date later, maybe not as much as the $50 prize money, but he’d take what he could get.

Dave’s mother didn’t really understand art. Certainly didn’t understand a mess of trash. But if the professional did, it was good enough for her. It eased her mind about his future.

When The Artists’ Way arrived in his campus post box, too big and awkward, and requiring he stand irritatingly in line to retrieve it directly from the distracted girl behind the window, he understood it for what it was, acceptance. The small inscription, “For my son, the artist,” meant more to him than anything the book might contain. (What could it teach him that his professors couldn’t?) He forgot to call and thank her though, too busy trying to catch the eye of that girl

Today, Dave is a 42-year-old High School art teacher. He still dabbles in the occasional free-form, not for a profit art of his youth, but has largely given it up for the stability of a 7 to 5(ish) job, with the chance to pontificate to a captive audience, and the summers off. He’d kept his mother’s peace-offering until last year, when his twelve-year-old twins insisted they couldn’t share a room any longer. His office-slash-studio moved to the garage, to make way for a second bedroom covered in My Little Pony and boy band posters. The books had been sacrificed to the gods of needed-space. But the son, the artist  was ok with that.