Image of Strength and Love

She was born to a woman that was in her second marriage. Her mother was a bit older than her father when they married. She was his only daughter but there were many more children already from her first marriage. The youngest of those siblings was already 16 when she came along so there weren’t many playmates her age at the time.

Her father was a lumberjack that had recently immigrated to the United States. He taught her how to work hard for what you have. He supported the family the only way he knew how, hard work. Almost 9 years after her birth, she lost her mother to illness just before her own birthday.

Her father was not prepared to care for children on his own so she went to live with her older siblings but often changing from one house to another and not settling in to call it her own.

When she was 12, her father remarried and they took her back into their home. She was never treated as being good enough by the new wife but was told to call her mother and have respect for her. The wife would often seem jealous of the attention she would get from her father and so she felt pressured to find a way to leave home.

She did want a family and that is what she prayed for. She wanted a lot of children to raise and love as she knew she had a lot of love to give. She learned how to love from her birth mother and what it meant to truly give for your child.

Her sister (16 years older) and her brother-in-law introduced her to someone, he seemed a bit of a loner. She liked him but didn’t think it would turn into much. They ended up getting married a little while later. She left school for him and became a housewife. They had their first two children before leaving the state and traveling thousands of miles away to live.

Before long they added 5 more children to the family and she couldn’t have loved them any less. Yet, her husband soon passed from illness also and so again she was alone. This time, she was alone, 32 years old and the caretaker of seven children. She had left school for marriage so she did not have her diploma. She had only briefly had a waitress position years ago and that wasn’t for long since her husband was the jealous type.

She learned to drive, enrolled back in school and fought to keep her family together. The state had stepped in trying to tell her that she couldn’t take care of all of her children. She fought and she proved them wrong. She and her children were not separated but instead stayed together in the little house that she and her husband had mortgaged a few years earlier.

It was hard but there were times of joy and wonder as she and the children seemed to grow up together at times. She showed them that she was a fighter and a very hard worker that had an unlimited amount of love for her children.

It was that love for her children that she pushed aside her own health needs and she too would pass due to illness at the age of 61. You might not think this is young but as you reach closer to the age yourself, you realize just how young she was.

She is my mother, her passing does not stop her from being my mother so that is correctly in the present tense. She showed me how to keep the family afloat and although we might not have money, we do have love. I live in that very house and I walk the floors feeling her presence sometimes and smelling cigarette smoke. My father was a smoker so that could be.

She is my hero and if I can be a third of who she was on this earth, then I am blessed. I have never met anyone that has gone through what she did and I don’t believe that I ever will.

I love you mom.

Smoke in the Air

I woke up last night from a sound sleep, the strong smell of smoke started me coughing and that’s really what woke me up. It scared me but I could see fine (at least without my glasses). The smell was like a muck fire, if you’ve ever smelled a muck fire, you won’t soon forget it. It completely filled my room and terrified me enough to jump out of bed. I took a drink first because the coughing was so bad. I then went to the hallway and turned to my sons’ room. He was already awake from the smell and said that he had checked the entire house. I went to the living room but the smell was not there. It seemed to be concentrated in my room and my sons’ room. It dawned on me that we have window a/c units and had them on last night. It must have been pulling in the smell from outside.

I shut the a/c units off but still didn’t trust it enough so I threw open the window, yes in the pitch darkness, to try and smell the air from outside. I was relieved to smell the same thing outside but at that point knew it had to be someone else’s house. Although I’m glad it wasn’t us, I don’t want it to be anyone else either. I know, you might think it would be okay because then we would have an insurance payout…not so fast. The house is old and we’ve been told by various insurance agencies that it has to be updated before they will touch it and I cannot afford those upgrades so we would be without everything if that happened.

It took a while to settle down and finally get back to sleep. With the a/c units turned off, we turned on the floor fans to help circulate the smell out of our rooms and make them breathable again. I think I was awake for another hour while my son said it was 4 am before he got back to sleep.

This morning I watched the news to see if any report of a house fire was on but nothing except for one in the town next to ours. No out of control fires either that would have blown our way with the wind. It was so weird and so strong, how could there not have been sirens either? Is something trying to tell us something? Is something telling us to go ahead and move? It’s been a thought running through my mind lately that we should go ahead and move and find a rental instead until it’s good enough to move. But I have two older cats and it’s hard to find somewhere that lets you have pets, along with a 3 bedroom. I can start looking but it scares me too. In order to move, we would have to sign a lease that would hold us for about a year. What if we find something two months after moving, how does that work? I’m truly confused and don’t know what to do.

I really wish I had someone with experience that could give me advise on what to do.

One Day at a Time

Yesterday was a slow day around the house. I didn’t feel like doing anything except being a blob in front of the television. With all of the stress lately, my energy has all but depleted. It actually felt good to waste two hours on an old John Wayne movie and almost forget what has been happening.

After that of course, I wasn’t able to let the shopping trip go another day as we had two stores to go to, the hardware store and the grocery store. It’s been so bad lately that even shopping doesn’t appeal to me anymore. But as I’m the driver in the house, off we went. The hardware store was actually relaxing and I don’t know why but it just seemed calm in there for some reason. My nerves settled down a bit as we headed to the grocery store. It was quiet in there at first and then I could feel more and more people filling up the isles. With it being Sunday, we might have gotten there just before church let out and now everyone was doing their Sunday shopping in their Sunday best.

Splurges haven’t been on my list lately, or for a long time, but I just felt like we deserved it even though that sounds selfish. But I bought a movie for us all to watch when we got home. It wasn’t a cartoon and it wasn’t a horrible violent one either, it was a family movie that we all actually enjoyed. Later on, about dusk, we had to go outside and put our hardware store trip to work. I took one step outside the door where the change in temperature and smell of the air took me by surprise. The coolness seemed to make the air smell so fresh and inviting, I couldn’t get enough. Literally, I couldn’t get enough. We finished the work we had to do but I just couldn’t bring myself to go inside. Maybe I just missed being outside so much but I knew it wasn’t safe to stay too long in our yard. We all decided that we would go for a ride with our windows slightly opened. We drove around for about an hour with the windows open just enough for a nice breeze to flow through the car. We stopped for a drink before heading back to the house but the air was just amazing.

This morning, even though I have to work, I feel rejuvenated. I’ve decided to take things into my own hands and look for companies that will finance me with what I have. I’ve been waiting for others to answer me on “who they work with” except for one that I found through the website that you look for houses on and well, she’s a joke.  But this morning, I’m doing my research and going to see if I can do anything about it. I feel good but I’m also hoping it isn’t just the air that is making me feel optimistic.

One day at a time, I can’t do anything but what I’m doing and that is my best.

El Día de los Muertos

Today is my mothers birthday. I will never forget it and I never did before because it’s so close to my own. Maybe that’s why we were the closest in the family, I don’t know. But now it’s a day of remembrance instead of celebration. How do we make the change back to celebration?

El Día de Los Muertos is a day that I have grown to respect and think of a lot. Why is it that we do not celebrate the lives that we were blessed to have in our own. Sometimes I can be sitting at my desk and suddenly have the strong odor of cigarettes surrounding me. No one in my current family smokes and I can’t tell you when the last time a cigarette was in the house but my Father smoked when I was younger. There are also times that I can smell my mothers’ illness. For anyone that taken care of someone that is ill, they know that the person has a fragrance that comes over them. It’s not a normal smell but it’s not horrible either, it’s just what we realize is their illness. When it happens, it’s comforting to me for some reason while the smell of cigarette smoke just kind of freaks me out. I was seven when my Father past so I don’t have many memories of him, just like remembered feelings, it’s weird I know.

Today I find sadness coming over me and I don’t want it to. My mother would not want me to be sad for her. She is out of pain and hopefully with family. I want to remember and celebrate her for the amazingly strong woman that she was while here on this earth. If I am ever a quarter of who she was here, I would have accomplished amazing things in life. Not that she had material things but that she didn’t care about them and gave all she had to anyone in need, especially children. Yes, anyone with seven children would have to have a soft spot for them.  It’s all she said she ever wanted in life was to have children. Then when her own children grew up, she started to care for other children and they were blessed to have experienced her.

This is what I want to celebrate, life! Her life meant so much to others and all she gave was all she had. We experienced so much with literally nothing but we never knew any different. Sure when we got a bit older, we would want things, but we learned that if you want something then it is not needed and you need to work if you want it. I still to this day know the difference between need an want and am teaching that to my granddaughter. Is that the celebration of her life? Am I celebrating each day instead by passing down what she taught me?  Or would I be honoring her by doing this? Are they one and the same or different, I don’t know and I’m confused now.

I can’t visit her final resting as it’s over 1,000 miles away so I cannot do as they do for El Día de Los Muertos exactly. So how would I do something like that here? I truly think I’m on the right path with this though, just have to figure it out.

Smells

I awoke last night at 1 am to a very strong smell of coffee. Thinking it was time to get up, I reached for my phone to turn off the alarm and that’s when I could see the real time. Thinking that the coffee pot was on the fritz due to a power outage last week, I pulled the covers back over me and tried to go back to sleep.

Every half hour or so, my eyes would open with a feeling again of the coffee needing my attention. No smell of smoke, no fear in my mind but just the strong smell in my room. I did set the coffee to start for the next morning as I normally do but this has never happened before. Was I being told that I just needed to get up, what was going on?

Whether it was just being very tired or laziness, I decided each time not to get out of bed and to try and push through in order to get some sleep. Finally, 5 am came around, I normally get up at 5:30 am so I gave in and got up. Keeping to my morning ritual, I walked out of the restroom again to smell the coffee. By this time I truly thought that the coffee pot would have hit it’s two-hour timer and turned itself off.

Turning the light on in the kitchen, I hear the familiar drip and hiss sound of the coffee pot, it was just starting to brew! There wasn’t yet the strong smell of coffee in the room as it was in my bedroom last night. This was beyond strange because I truly expected to see a full pot of cold coffee waiting for me to heat back up this morning.

Sometimes I can sit in my bedroom and smell smoke, like a cigarette. No one in my house smokes and a smoker hasn’t lived here since my father who passed in 1976. So it’s strange how smells can take over a moment and well, a night if I’m counting the hours of last night. But why coffee and why so strong that it wakes me up? Was I supposed to get up and just didn’t do it? I’m worried to find what I missed from not heeding its warning.

Nothing seems to be out of the ordinary and I actually fell asleep in the living room for 15 minutes after setting my fresh cup of coffee down. Thank goodness I didn’t sleep for longer or I would have been late for work. However, I do wish I had the day off, my desk sits beside my bed at the moment and the covers look so inviting. But the window is open and the sun is rising. Birds are chirping and happy that we filled the feeder. It’s so chipper outside I’m wondering when Mary Poppins is going to fly by! Seriously, it’s a beautiful morning and I’m having to watch it from my window, albeit better than not watching it so I am thankful. Thankful yet tired today, hopefully, that will pass just as the strong smell of coffee did and the day will continue to be beautiful.