First blog post. So much has happened since I first setup this website almost a year ago. I continued to write these posts out in my head but never actually sat down to transition them to this site. Now is the time, I guess. That said, the past few months alone have been a complete and utter whirlwind and even bigger shit show. Let’s start with the hardest and work out way out, shall we?
My Mom died.
This is a bittersweet thing to talk about. Bittersweet is not how many people would describe the death of a family member, yet alone a parent. My Mom and I haven’t exchanged more than a few words in the 3 years. Let me start by saying I love my Mother. Truly. And there is a part of me that will miss her unconditionally. On the other side of that coin, she was a total narcissistic asshole. She was manipulative, two-faced, spoiled, and erratic. There always had to be some kind of drama and on the rare occasion that there wasn’t any, she made sure to create it one way or another. I have (now) an almost 3-year old son that she never bothered to meet all because she wanted to be selfish and make something that WASN’T about her, about her; a trend I’ve dealt with all of my life. Any big event I ever had (graduations, my marriage/wedding, my son being born, buying my first house, relocating for a big promotion), if it wasn’t about her, she had to find a way to turn the attention in her direction. She couldn’t STAND not being the center of everyone’s story, regardless if it had anything to do with her or not.
My Mother has always had the talent to make nothing but bad decisions. She smoked, got involved with drugs (both using and distributing), had multiple boyfriends that all ended somewhat violently, always drank to much and made stupid decisions while doing so, married for money instead of love; she just overall did not do well at life. It was always about short term gains, and she never thought through the long term stuff. She’s the youngest of 3 and was pretty spoiled all her life from what I understand. I remember my Nana and Papa (her parents) CONSTANTLY yelling and screaming at each other. No one on that side of the family knew anything of love that I ever saw. There was no affection, no supporting of one another (not in a healthy way at least), no selflessness. It was always crass, vulgar, claws out behavior. So she really didn’t have any healthy examples to follow in parenting and was so used to the story always being about her, that she was incapable of thinking any differently when having her own child. (She wanted children, but I was constantly reminded while growing up that she couldn’t afford a second one that she always wanted. Apparently I wasn’t enough. Perhaps if she would have stayed in a stable marriage and actually WORKED for the things she wanted instead of spending half of her life unemployed and mooching off others, she could have gotten that. Thank god she didn’t, because I’m very inclined to believe a second child would have been even more unstable and fucked up than me)
But everyone makes bad decisions, Chris. Why is this any different?
Because a few particular bad decisions led to her death at the ripe-old age of 58. The first bad decision that I was always aware of was smoking. For as long as I can remember, my mom always wanted a pack of Marlboro Menthols, shorts, anytime we left the house for any errand. They used to come in a white box with a green label. She was never a chain smoker, but at her worst was probably going through a carton a week. When I turned 16, the first time she could send me to the store, it was for groceries. When I turned 18, the first time she sent me to the store, it was for cigarettes. I distinctly remember telling her that for my 12th birthday, I didn’t want anything except for her to quit smoking. She told me to ask for something else. Her smoking habits continued on until she turned 54, which she abruptly had to stop; more on that later.
The second bad decision that I didn’t find out much about until after she had passed away, was that during my childhood, she was both using and distributing cocaine out of the house that I lived in. Mind you, my parents got divorced when I was 2 and I only saw my Dad every other weekend and the occasional Wednesday after school. So living with my Mom was all I really knew. This is where the heavy narcissistic stuff kicks in. She hid it VERY well. I was pretty much completely oblivious to a lot of this going on. And it was probably pretty steady for 2ish years until one night she was busted, and she was busted HARD. I don’t know how she got off and didn’t end up in jail, honestly. All I know is that my Dad was called and told to come to the house to get me because my Mom was being arrested. I had to have been roughly 10-11 at the time. NO clue that was going on, but as I reflect back on that time of my childhood, a lot of things make sense leading up to that. The whole “using” part of this also comes in to play on a later part of this post because it meant a lot of “normal” drugs like Tylenol or Ibuprofen wouldn’t work for her when she needed it, and she was forced to turn to vicoden or norco.
The third bad decision that she made over and over and over again, was her inability to keep any relationship because of how selfish and greedy she was. Because the attention always needed to be on her, and the world needed to revolve on her, her default behavior was to always take away anything she could to hurt someone, so that they would need to come crawling back to her. This happened to me all of my life, and I watched her first hand do it to others. For me it was simple. I was her kid. She could take away my PlayStation, my TV, my car (that I paid for), my music lessons, my privileges, my friends, you name it. Once she got so mad at me she took the middle parts of my bassoon away because it was the first thing she saw that she could grab, and she wouldn’t return those pieces to me until I did what she wanted. Real good parenting, right? She was EXCELLENT at finding ways to hurt people. Not a great quality to have in a person. But I saw her do this to other people too. She once wouldn’t talk to her parents for 2 years and kept me away from them all because they were trying to financially help out her brother and his children, but not us. Because I wasn’t being spoiled like she wanted, she took me completely away from my grandparents. One Christmas they called my Dad and begged him to bring me over so they could see me and give me my presents. When my Mom found out he did, she flipped her god damn lid. With other people that she didn’t have near the granular control over of taking away their belongings, she took away the only thing she had power and control over: herself. She was SO used to people crawling back to her asking for her forgiveness that this worked nearly every time and it allowed her to get really good at it. That was, until about 4 years ago – when her world started to spiral out of control and she lost everything she had gained through greed and manipulation.
In 2019, my mother was having severe back pain, to the point where she couldn’t move. By this time she had re-married (2006) and had quite a good life for the most part. My step dad had his own successful company doing asbestos removal and had money. They met on a blind date and my mother saw nothing but dollar signs. So she jumped at the chance and married for the money. (I believe that eventually she came to truly love him for a brief period outside of the financial aspect. They traveled, laughed, smiled, cuddled, so it wasn’t ALL for the money, it’s just that the money came first and the love came later). Anyway, my mother was no stranger to physical issues throughout her life, so the backpain was semi-sort of written off to being muscular or a bulging disc. Regardless, it finally got so bad that she had to be taken to the hospital. 1 x-ray was all it took to realize this was a much bigger issue, and to the oncologist she went. She decided to go to the same oncologist that had taken care of and treated my grandfather for prostate cancer over a decade ago. Papa lived to be about 83, and dealt with his prostate cancer for roughly 3 years. Dr. Wallace did good with him and I was always grateful for that. After a few more tests, some poking and prodding, and a full scale MRI, my mother was diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer – a direct result of her smoking that I begged her to stop for 20+ years. We were all devastated.
Of course when she called to tell me, we were in the middle of buying our first home. Weeks earlier AEP and I had been touring all kinds of houses and putting in offers. I was in Europe for a work trip for some of these, often staying up until 2am local time to tour houses virtually with her as she walked through, and put in offers, signing everything on my work laptop in a crappy Dutch hotel with even shittier WIFI. Also on that trip, while out to a team dinner, I got a call from my Dad that my grandfather (his Dad) had passed away. That sucked too, because it was the first time in a long time I had really heard my Dad upset over the phone. Even worse, I was 1800 miles away and couldn’t’ do shit about it. That was one of the worst feelings. Anyway, I had switched my flight to Chicago instead and AEP drove up from Columbus to pick me up, bring fresh clothes, and we attended the funeral for my grandfather. The following weekend, we found our house on a whim and made a completely crazy offer, that was wildly accepted. That’s a story for another time. The day before we closed, my Mom decided to call me and tell me about her cancer diagnoses. There was no prognosis yet, not treatment plan, NOTHING, besides the fact that it was confirmed she had cancer. I spent the first 4 days in my brand new house with my wife being nothing but depressed, emotional, and as about as un-excited as you could be after buying your first home, which is big and beautiful and perfect for our little family. Again, something that SHOULD have been about me, was now about her.
Listen – I’m not mad that she told me. What I’m mad at was that this was typical at this point. She could have waited a few more days to tell me after we were moved in and kind of settled. After we had gotten past the great fun time and excitement of buying a house. She could have called me to tell me after they had more info, or that they had a follow up appointment scheduled to discuss her results and that she wanted me to come home to be there with her. FINE. But instead she decided to give me as little info as possible, to try and UPSET me as much as possible, to ruin yet another good thing that was happening in my life. Something that AEP and I had worked HARD for, saved for, sacrificed for, cried, sweat, and bled for. But no, it was another moment that I’ll never get back because she had to take it and, once again, make it about her. And before you go and call me inconsiderate or a fucking asshole for feeling this way, just know that she KNEW about every step of our house buying process because during that time in our lives, we talked daily. And it wasn’t like it was the first time she had pulled something like this either.
So let’s keep going with how this lead to hear untimely death in late 2023. As she got more and more sick, she got even more delusional. Of course the first thing was to stop smoking, which, to my surprise, she cut out cold turkey and I was quite surprised and proud of her for. Granted it was a little too late, but she didn’t use it as an excuse to keep going. Things started to take a downward turn shortly after her first round of chemo. She lost all of her hair and with that what little dignity she actually had went with. She was the type of person that “didn’t want anyone to know she was sick” but told every she met immediately. From cashiers, to neighbors, and anyone else that would lend an ear, she had to let them know she had cancer. But she didn’t want them to know by looking at her, she wanted to control the narrative. She refused to do any more chemo after that first round because she “loved her hair” and didn’t want to lose it again. Didn’t matter if it would save her life, so long as she looked good to other people because THAT was more important. She started telling people different stories about her doctors visits and exaggerating what Dr. Wallace would tell her. Making it far worse than what he said so that she could get more sympathy and attention.
Let’s go back a second. When she was diagnosed with cancer, it was stage 4. After her first round of chemo, she went back for an MRI and had this weird, WILD expectation that she would be cured. When Dr. Wallace told her that the tumor in her back and shrunk significantly and that she was making good progress, she was DEVESTATED. She acted like he had told her nothing was going to work and things were going to get worse FAST. Her original prognosis by the way was 13 months. I was there for the first few visits, traveling back to Chicago frequently to help where I could. The SECOND he gave her a prognosis, a timer started in her head and she was convinced that when August of 2020 came around, she was just going to drop dead, like a scene out of “In Time”. (great movie, by the way, if you haven’t seen it).
So with all of this in mind, everyone stepped up. My entire family started asking what they could do to help. Friends, friends of friends, whoever could help, would try. And they would be met with a sob story of “no I don’t need help. I’ll just be fine”. Which was my mother’s way of trying to gain MORE sympathy. Starting to see a pattern? Things really started to come to a head the day before Christmas Eve of 2019. AEP and I had just arrived from Columbus to start our annual Christmas travels of seeing all of our family, who are spread across the Midwest. I had bought my Mom and I tickets to go downtown and see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Christmas annual Yule Tide Christmas concert. This was a tradition we did most years, just her and I and it’s one of my more fond memories with her. I walked in to see one of her neighbors there, and my cousin. My Mom was furious and there was a ton of commotion. Come to find out she had finally pulled the narcissistic shit on my step dad long enough and he snapped. He grabbed what he could, swallowed a handful of pills, and left. Drove off in the snow and no one knew where he went as he had also left his cell phone behind. In short, my other drove him out. I know this, because she started showing everyone a video she took of him going crazy with her being “seemingly calm” in the background. But this is the narcissist way. She got him all riled up before hand, probably screaming and making a scene just like her parents used to, and when he finally had enough and snapped back, she got the camera rolling and put on a show to make it seem like he snapped out of no where and this was all out of the blue. Sympathy poured out for her. Her husband had walked out 2 days before Christmas, she was sick with Cancer, and poor poor Nancy started to get the attention she wanted. But this is where I think began she split, because she was convinced after a day or two he could come crawling back with flowers like he had always done in the past, begging for forgiveness, and her telling him that he needed to get help because there was nothing wrong with her and everything wrong with him. Except this time, he didn’t. He never called, he never returned (except supposedly one time to try and get some more of his things), and he kind of fell off the face of the earth for a bit. She tried to call the police that night and tell them to put him under a 72 hour psychiatric hold. THIS was the level my mother always stooped to. All power, all control. It was never about love, it was about the money.
I should mention that by this point, the money was gone. They were dangerously behind on their mortgage because the market crashed along with my mom’s home value and they felt that they “shouldn’t be paying on something that yielded no return”. It’s worth noting too that my step-dad got sick (probably from stress) and had to stop working, lay off his employees, and close his company. That hurt, and I know it hurt him too because he felt like he failed. It was just a bad situation. So with that, the money started to disappear, and with that, the love. Because when life is good, it’s good. But the second life gets hard with sickness or financial issues, that’s when the relationship gets tested and you start to see what’s truly important in the core values and foundation on which your marriage/partnership was built. I know this because AEP and I have been through good times and bad, as have both of our parents (my Dad and step-mom) and all of us are continuing to go strong through it all. But for my Mom, once there was no money, there was also no love. They started sleeping in separate rooms, more time apart, and eventually, their separation.
So it’s Christmas Eve. We missed the concert that I worked hard and saved for, everyone was mad or pissed, but we continued on and still had the family over so my mother could once again gag herself with sympathy from everyone else. AEP and I pushed on through our Christmas travels and hoped things would settle down. They didn’t. Over the next few months, my Mom got angrier and angrier at the level of control she was losing. She was now on the brink of losing the house and was getting pissed that no one was offering for her to move in and mooch off them (which isn’t true. My cousin offered and she declined, and we didn’t offer because we lived 3 states away). She expected everyone to stop living their own lives and revolve around her. The expectation was that we should have all offered for her to move in and take care of her, or quit or jobs and spent every waking minute with her, or stop our careers and sell our houses and move closer, whatever. When that DIDN’T happen, despite helping as much as we could HOW we could, it wasn’t enough, and one by one you watched each family member get pushed away and out of the picture. THIS is the piece that a lot of her friends don’t know about and weren’t around to experience. THEN: Covid. Covid meant she was mostly confined to the house. She couldn’t leave, people would bring her stuff and leave it outside. She really only ever went to doc appointments. It also meant that the government put in place an order that people couldn’t be evicted. So not only was she $45k behind on her mortgage, now she just bought herself two more years of free rent before the bank finally seized the house from under her. From what I understand, my stepdad, who had not been in contact for months, was still letting his pension and disability hit their joint checking account too, and wasn’t using much of it. They still hadn’t filed for divorce and it would be another few years before that would take place.
As the family slowly got pushed away for not stopping everything to help, AEP and I were the last ones still on the roster. During the summer months of 2020 when her treatment seemed to be having a positive affect and she felt better, she packed up her 3 yorkies and made the 6 hour drive out to see our new house for the first time. She came out over a weekend and we went to Topgolf with friends, had some drinks, and just bummed around Columbus and had fun. On Saturday morning when she came down, I handed her a cup of coffee in a special mug that we had ordered. The mug read, “The best Mom’s get promoted to Nana”. It took her a bit to actually notice it and only after I pointed it out several times to her. She was the last of our parents to find out because we wanted to tell her in person, but she was thrilled. For YEARS she had been asking if we were going to have kids. We always told her, “yeah, maybe eventually”. We didn’t shotgun anything in our relationship. In fact, we are the ONLY cousins on either side of our generation to have our first child INSIDE of a marriage. That’s out of 6 cousins so far. NOT to say how they did it was wrong, but we took 7 years to get engaged, and another 5 years to really enjoy our marriage before we decided to bring a semon demon into the picture. We really got established in our careers first, financially stable, and bought a house suitable to raise a family in before we pulled that particular trigger. Needless to say, she was happy. And I secretly had hoped it would give her more ammo to fight her diagnosis since I knew how much having a grandchild meant to her. Apparently I couldn’t have been more wrong.
September rolled around and we were ready to tell the rest of the world. We had a friend come over and do multiple photoshoots of silly announcement photos that we could post on the interwebs. We showed all of our parents first and told them our plan. Everyone was happy and laughingly rolled their eyes at our nerdy announcement photos (harry potter, legos, video games, scuba, music. I told you we love a lot of things). But this was new territory for my mother, and she needed to establish her appropriate level of control. So she sternly directs me to block members of my step-dads family on facebook. “They can’t see this. They’re just going to talk bad about it.” – “Mom, why does that matter? Who cares what they have to say? This is our news and I don’t care who knows. That’s why we’re putting it on facebook”. – “YOU don’t support me! They left me and took me off their family members on Facebook. You need to block them so they can’t see this” – “*Sigh* – Fine. whatever.” :Hit Post: – 100+ comments; 300+ likes.
The next morning the shit absolutely hits the fucking fan. I haven’t heard from Mom yet, so I call to check in as I usually do to see how things are going. She lays into me, about how I didn’t block anyone and that she saw a few of his family saw, liked, and commented on the post. They said, ‘Congratulations’, on my post, folks. It wasn’t like they said, “Wow, can’t believe you fucktards are bringing life into this world”. This downward spirals into a crazy conversation where I begin to just laugh at my mom’s manic delusional bullshit because when I confront her as to why it mattered if they saw, her exact response was, “They’re going to talk bad about the baby and it’s going to give it bad juju!!”. I cannot begin to tell you how stupefied I was at this response. You see? It was never about my unborn child, it was about HER and not getting the level of control she felt like she deserved over MY news, MY child, and MY life. That conversation continued to divulge into madness while she tried to justify her point, and told me how terrible of a son I was. She kept reminding me how disappointed she was in me, that I never supported her, that I laugh at her delusions, that it’s all my wife’s fault because she’s terrible and has changed me. Yeah, Mom, we’re supposed to change. It’s called GROWING; something YOU never did. I made the (not really) mistake of telling her that his phone call was being recorded, and that I would have that to listen to for the rest of my life. Lid. Fucking. Exploded. POOF. GONE. In god damn orbit at this point. Bye bye lid. Rage monster came out swinging. Even when I tried to explain that the reason I started recording our phone calls was so that I could listen to the good ones when she was gone and hear her voice (which was the real reason, by the way), that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. At this point I had invaded her privacy. She had lost all control of the one person left she thought she had control of, and this was the final straw. But what could she possibly take away? She didn’t pay for my phone anymore (since college when she randomly shut it off because I wouldn’t’ show her my grades for a degree she wasn’t paying for), she couldn’t take away my car (that I had paid for and was 3 states away), she couldn’t take away any of my possessions because I no longer lived under her roof. So what was her next play? She finally took away from me what I had watched her take away from everyone else in her life for years and years and years. She took away herself. The last words I ever have, and will have heard my mom speak to me when she was “of solid mind” were: “Just pretend I’m already dead. Have a nice life” :click:
And with that, we stopped talking. I have that call recorded, I still listen to it from time to time. Since that day back in September there were a few texts exchanged here and there. A, “Congrats” when we posted our gender reveal video that October, a few “Merry Christmas’s” and “Happy Birthdays”. I constantly opened the door, but never walked through it with out communication. I wanted HER to be the one that reached out for once. To come back to ME. Because it was her that had given up her son and her grandchild. I never held anything hostage from her. But she never did. She never reached out. A few kind gestures over the last year of her life were that she had my son’s name embroidered on a nice Christmas bag and sent to me, to which I promptly texted her to thank her for and all I got back in return was “Merry Christmas”. And once she finally got kicked out of her house, she took the last of my old stuffies from when I was a kid and gave them to a neighbor to coordinate me picking them up. It was the last of the stuff of mine that she had and she couldn’t even be bothered to offer it to me herself.
Throughout the years I kept tabs on her in different ways. I would hear things through family about the little tidbits of info she would let slip. Grape fine, facebook, what have you. I pieced together what I could, but really was just relieved that she was still out there kicking. I always hoped she would recover, or that some new kick-ass experimental treatment would come out that would help start to reverse things and she could go on to live longer. It wasn’t until right after my birthday in 2023 that I got a call that things had taken a bad turn. She was in the hospital, and the cancer had moved into her brain. It seemed like it was now spreading to all parts of her body and she was quickly losing the war. Her communication began to suffer and her mobility was quickly becoming non-existent. From what I’ve heard, she was the one that requested to be moved to hospice after the hospital told her she couldn’t stay because there was nothing else she could do. I got that call on a Tuesday night after one of her friends (thank god) had called my aunt to let her know things had taken a turn for the worse. On Wednesday morning, we packed up and left for Chicago. Dropped my son off at my Dads and went straight for the hospice center. My entire family (just 6 of us, really) met and walked in at roughly the same time. My mom really wasn’t audible at that point. She recognized all of us, and had a few tears in her eyes. The tears of a woman who was on her deathbed and realized she had royally fucked up. Or at least that’s what I hope. She only ever spoke to my aunt and me. Kept asking us to “help her” and “I want to go home”. She couldnt’ say anything out side of that and was so drugged up that even non-verbal communication was hard. We stayed for about 6 hours and held hands and tried to talk and communicate the best we could. The next day, I was back there for 12 hours while the family and friends came and went. I spent a lot of time talking to her even though she was sleeping most of the day while I never said sorry, I did fill her in on everything she had missed. Nothing was ever about anger or disappointment, just trying to pick up where we left off like we always had after a big fight and make up. And on Friday morning, we took our time getting there but shortly before we left got a call from the hospice center that things had turned and the time was nearing.
My Mom’s death was actually kind of cool. I’m not stranger to death, I’ve been around a lot of people who have taken their last breaths in front of me or passed away shortly before. Death has never really bothered me when it comes to humans. It’s a natural part of life. We’re imperfect, and I am convinced that when we leave our meat suits behind our souls go on to a new plane where we exist in peace and comfort. I also believe that our consciousness creates our afterlife. If you’re religious and believe in Heaven and Hell, your consciousness places you in one of those places where you feel you deserve to be. If you believe in bright fields and gorgeous pastures, maybe that’s where you go. If you believe in the stars and celestials or an alternate universe, maybe you end up there. Regardless, I feel like a soul is something that never dies, it just transitions to the next stage. Whether we remember previous stages or not is an entirely new question.
My Mom’s eyes had been closed through the last 36 hours or so. When we got the call from hospice, my entire family dropped (once again) what they were doing to head there and be by her side. Her breathing was shallow, her color was quickly draining, and she seemed like she was getting one of the best naps she ever had. At one point it came up that she used to run into my cousin while out and about and they would occasionally go grab a beer. She loved Michelob Ultras with a Lime towards the end. We had a brilliant idea to give her one last toast, one last send off; “One for the ditch, Mom!”. Our cousin went out to find a 6 pack. When she got back, we all cracked a beer and made one last toast to my Mom while we all stood around her bed. My cousin took a one of those small sponges and put a few drops of beer into my Mom’s open mouth. We all took a few more swigs, and that that moment, she decided it was time. She drew her last few breaths, her eyes opened wider than we had seen all week, slowly closed, and that was it.
We’re pretty sure she was looking “through” my aunt who was standing directly in her line of sight, while whoever was there to help her transition came to pick her soul up and carry it on. She also had a rare “tear of goodbye” which supposedly only hits 14% of all deaths. This is when a tear forms in the right eye after they have passed on. Considering she was severely dehydrated by this point, I’m inclined to believe in that tear actually being a “sorry” from her on her way out the door. Whether or not that “sorry” was accompanied by a middle finger is another story. So why was this all really cool? Really the only reason is because drinking together was what my family always did best. My Mom loved to drink (no surprise there given her history of other things), and anytime there was a gathering we all started drinking just to deal with each other. It’s not that we don’t all love each other or get along, we do just fine. It’s just that we’re all A LOT to deal with in our own ways, and when you cram us all into a room well….. we drink, more or less to keep a neutral ground and tolerate each other. So we all got to drink together one less time and toast Mom, giving her “one for the ditch”.
It’s been just over 3 months now. We made it through the holidays and New Year. My Mom didn’t have a lot of money and the end and didn’t want a funeral because she, “didn’t want to give anyone closure”. If you’ve made it this far and you’re shocked by this statement then you clearly didn’t comprehend a single word above. Her band of friends that she entrusted and took care of her for the last 24ish months all threw a small memorial for her and she’s buried in the wall at our family’s cemetery in Chicago next to her Dad and with her 3 Yorkies. That’s an entirely different story that I’ll have to write about later. In short, most of her friends were angels, but there is one in particular that is absolutely piece of shit cunt who I hope gets what she has coming to her after the bullshit she pulled and continues to spew. Fuck you Joanna, you dumb cunt. Put your own head between your legs, shove it up your dirty tight asshole, and spew your hate into yourself where that shit belongs you fuck twat.
I have my days where I struggle with it. I have times where I miss her, fucked up as that may be. I did love my mother a lot. I bitched a lot about her above but I have a lot of good memories too. She was handed a pretty shitty card right out of the gate. She wasn’t raised well or in a healthy environment, but more so she refused to recognize that and seek the help that we all knew she needed. There was never a question that she could handle the physical implications of her treatment, but I think we all underestimated the mental toll this was going to take and just how bad it would actually get. She did what she could to be a good mother when she tried, it’s just that she almost always tried to put herself first in any situation and honestly, should have never had kids. I’m grateful to recognize these things and to be here, and to have a shot at raising my own child in a healthy way. My wife is also a god-send for that and patient as can be with both me and my son, who has my attitude. She comes from a good family that is sometimes TOO good at being family, but they’re all patient, loving, supportive, and accepting, and I couldn’t be more thankful for that.
One of these days I’ll go into all of the GOOD things my Mom used to do. She was devilishly creative in all aspects of life, a great entertainer, a fantastic cook, and a great planner. All things that she also used to manipulate and control others with, but for parts of her life she had a good heart in the right place. I do truly believe she had good intentions with most things that she did. In a weird, strange way to honor this, we continue to throw kick ass Halloween parties every year, and we try to do a lot for others when we can, whether that’s financially, or just little things here or there like snow-plowing the neighbors driveway without them asking. In order to keep the good things in my heart about my mother, I had beautiful angel ornaments made up with her name, years, and a small saying. I passed these out to all of my family and a handful of her close friends this year for Christmas. It’s what she would have done. In a note to a few of her friends, I put, “Mom always felt that everyone should have an angel at the top of their tree. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being one of HER angels, so that now she can be one of yours”.
My Mom didn’t allow me to be there for the later, last parts of her life and intentionally kept her life hidden from me and my family just because we wouldn’t bend to her will. To her friends, we were all made the villain of her story so that she could get sympathy and help from those who she hadn’t pushed away yet. If it weren’t for Janice, I would have never had the chance to stay by her side for 3 days and say my last goodbyes. For that, I will forever be grateful. I did the angel thing because I 1) I loved that we have a glass one from when Papa died that the funeral home gave us, and 2) It’s what my Mom would have done for any of her friends. So Mom, once again you’ve gotten your way. My very first blog post on my new site is about you. You’re not gonna like it, because it highlights everything bad, but the title of this site isn’t “Happy Thoughts From Chris”. I’m just here to bitch about it.