I am in a MOOD people a MOOD!! I feel the need to tell you about my moms today for some reason. Growing up moving from state to state city to city was way hard and I always hated that crap. Wed come home from school and what ever fit in the car is what we left with.30 elementary schools before the 5th grade. Always being the new kid and the FAT new kid to boot explains a lot about my personality. Aint met a person I cant talk to LOL No chance to say good bye to any little playmates ( cant call em friends really as I never really got to know them. ) I never realized how much it hurt her to have to make those moves but we all did what dad wanted. Ima gloss over pretty much everything up to around the age of 12. I can still see the headlights on our front porch where dad pulled up and turned off the car just so he could continue beating the hell out of moms. Two little girls ages 12 and 11 in the back seat suddenly and not surprisingly very violently, start hitting him with their tiny fists. This stops him dead in his tracks.... he actually gets out of the car and says with a straight face I cant stay where anyone puts hands on me . This coming from the man who had beat us and our moms our whole life. This one act of courage from 2 little girls made our moms finally see that we could no longer live that way and she divorced him. When I was older I asked her why she put up with it for so many years and she says simple answer is a bad dad was better than no dad in her eyes. She never knew her father. Ever. When I think back on my childhood there are very few memories I have from before that night. So here is this broken woman. This woman who took beatings from a man that force fed her to stay fat and TOLD her that she was lucky to have him because NO other man would want a fat woman. Who he had busted a big dresser mirror over her head because HE moved when she was cutting his hair and got nicked. 125 stitches. She worked her ass off always . She made sure that we had clothes and shoes while she went without. She had 2 dresses. A slip and undergarments one of each. She worked at the county hospital I think back now and see that she always had the white uniform on and those dreadful white hospital shoes. She worked long hours and of course the graveyard shift so that she could get us off to school in the morning and be there when we got home from school. She got hurt when a patient fell on her. She had broken her back literally twice now. She could not work and she reluctantly applied for public assistance. Back then it was not something any one wanted to do. She also found out that she could qualify for public housing since dad had been a VET. She just could not abide NOT being able to work. She started to work for the State as a sitter for the state. The children she took on were the ones no other worker wanted to take care of. There was a real need for good caring people for the special needs kids. There were hundreds of kids that came through Granmas home. There was even the kids of kids she had baby sat and was now taking care of their kids. This is also to this day I can not STAND to HEAR a person eat and OMG plz dont let me see what you are chewing ( unless of course its me and my g~baby trying to gross out her mom LOL) She was the citys FIRST unofficial information and referral program LOL Here in Columbus its 211 from any phone. If you needed a place to stay you called my mom. If you needed furniture for the place you called my mom. If you needed clothes so you could go get a job you called my mom. If your kids needed clothes for school you called my mom. If you needed food you called my mom and nine out of ten times what she gave you came from her own pantry. She is the one that wrangled me in to picking up the clothes donations for the neighborhood as well as the sandwiches from the convenience stores and 50 pound flour bags full of donuts for the community center that fed homeless and low income seniors daily. I helped pack the sack lunches for them all to take home for the weekend when the center was closed .I made the rounds for her daily. She loved kids.... we didnt get to have friends over much but when we did it was in a huge way.. I can recall sitting out in the back yard along the wall and there would be 20 30 kids and she is telling ghost stories. If a kid found a stray dog, cat or wounded bird they all came to see my mom.... She got the notion one year that ALL the kids in the projects deserved to go to the circus. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus had been pulling up in their trains for years right across from the projects and every year they did a little parade taking all the critters and stuff to the community center. She called the Shriners and they called the circus and she would get 200 tickets every year for the mattenae shows. As us kids got older we all got to be the chaperones . One of the things I really do miss is the way a cool summer night could be dead as nails. But let just ONE person go sit on the wall, the bench or the ramada and before ya know it someone has brought out the 8 tracks and popped open the trunk of the car so we could hear the music blastin out of the big ass house speakers in the trunk... there would be the first beer (remember when you had a beer opener?? LOL ) , or wine cooler ( yeah we thought we was way cool back then with a wine cooler) some mad-dog 20/20 and the ever fragrant, big fat joints. Impromptu block party!! The circus folks lived on the train and some of them wandered over and joined in. My moms found out they were hungry and so a little tradition began. The people from the circus , not all of em cuz a LOT of them were snobs, mostly the guys in the unicycle basketball troupe, King Charles Troupe , would come over after they closed up for the night and shed feed em all ..I learned how to hop on a unicycle up and down stairs but for the life of me I never mastered just riding in a straight line on level ground. So they would come hang out and my mom along with some other women in the jets would cook up some good home cooking. My mom never met anyone she didnt want to feed LOL Sadly things change and grow and the City of Tucson made it easier for the train to get to the community center so they stopped parking the train by the projects. She still made sure the kids got the tickets every year. She was featured on a news story I think it was channel 4 , all about the Granma. She was SO tickled about that! Didnt have any VCR back then or I would have recorded that. I have done similar things in my life, helping others when I could. My daughter is SO like my moms in that she just loves kids and there is always a house full of them. I forget to tell her sometimes how much she reminds me of moms. My son is the kind of man that has had the same friends pretty much his whole life. That right there is a testament to the great man he is. He is caring and loyal and strong and focused and dedicated. How many of us have had the same friends for 30 years? Not just oh yeah so and so just got a post card but actually still hangs out with them? On the regular?? I love my kids, I miss my mom I miss my sister. Now I gotta do a serious spell check cuz I been crying through most of this and for SOME annoying reason I will be typing something and next thing I know the word has moved to a different place on the screen. Its pissing me off something royal. Peace and love, Paula aka Terri!
Posted on: Sat, 23 Nov 2013 12:04:37 +0000
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