"How My Father's How My Mother's" - Story Time!

My parents were new and dirt poor. They moved to Us look for a break and a new start. They arrived in Buffalo from Nova Scotia while my mother was 5 months pregnant with me. I was born in 1981, the year Lennon was shot. We lived in the track of our Ford Econoline van, which was not the best place to call "home," but it was cozy. We were close, loving, and miserable. My parents were really different from each other.

My father was kind, but weak. We made our "spirit" by working for kitchens, preparing vegetables and cut the kernel for cheap wages. We`d buy only what we needed to extort by. He`d drop the remainder on alcohol. He would say it was his "release." He got his liquor, I got to keep my worn out shoes, and my mother got no pretty blouses. But I loved him. Aside from the alcohol, he was as complete of a break as could be. Mother was beautiful, in a sad kind of way. She was smart, caring, always doing little things to help people, but they would never even notice. I did. She was my mother and I wanted to be just like her. She could have been so much more, had she not fallen in bed with father. As nice as he was, he simply held her back. He was never going to win because of the alcohol. He just never realized that, and in a way, I don't think he ever even cared. Deep down, I don`t think he did. After a while, he had cut back on his alcohol enough to give us to get a small studio apartment. The happiness I felt could not be described. I'm 35 now, and through marrying a dream for a husband and having 2 wonderful children, I've never been as happy as that moment when I walked into that grimy, rat infested apartment for the 1st time, knowing it was ours. Ours. The heart was indescribable, knowing that we'd never get to go back to continue in that van again. Once we moved in, mother and I would go to the store in the evenings after I got home from school to scrounge up groceries. We would walk instead of drive. My father would be in the pool hall, drinking, playing darts, laughing, and spending lots of time with people who barely knew his name; people who would allow him if he were asleep for a few days, but they were yet his "buddies." Mother was my buddy. She and I lived for each other. She was my source of feeling and I her source of inspiration. We were each other`s way out. My mother, through sheer will, was able to get a job as a bank teller. She got a real job where she was actually making real money. My father then decided we could apply for him to resign his part-time janitorial job at the school. It would have been a lot better if he had decided to stop loss to the bars and drinking. His behaviour was getting worse and they would fight regularly. It would often end with mother weeping and father slamming the door on his way back to the bar. Once, instead of staying out until the sun came up, he came back not too long after I went to bed. He was crushed at her, yelling and swearing. She was trying to calm him down, pleading and crying. The position was escalating, and so got calm for the briefest of seconds. That`s when he hit her. I leaned up in bed in time to see him pass by the door. He paused, peering in at his lost daughter. I slinked down under the blanket. The next thing I heard was the door slam. It was the last time I ever saw him. The following morning, mother woke me up early and told me to submit my things. We left in the car she had bought the month earlier with her own money. Father died two years later. We went to the funeral and I cried. Mother cried too, but she cried not because he was gone, he had been gone to her long before he died. She was weeping because, for a moment, she remembered his dreams he told her so long ago. While I was in high school, mother and I had our ups and downs, yet we never wavered in our love for one another. I learned so often from her. Like the normal teenage girl, I had my share of boyfriends. Some of which were good, some of which were not, but I never let them treat me badly. If they cared enough, they wouldn't. If I felt they didn`t care enough, then I told them I was moving on, regardless how much I thought of them. My mother worked so hard and put up with so much to get us a semi-comfortable lifestyle that she was very able to help me pay for college. There was a time in my early adulthood that I realized her sacrifices. What she did, how she did it for me, and what it be her. It be her any chance left at reaching her dreams. Those were as little as my father. She didn't do it to offend him, she did it for me; to enable me to play my dreams. My wonderful life now is a termination of those difficult years for my mother. She could have just folded her tent like my father and stay on living like he did. It would be easy to say that the sole reason she didn't was because of me, but I don't think that is true. I think she would have fought anyway. A while back, I realized another thing. All I always wanted to be when I was a kid was to be like my mother. To be that strong. To make that will power. That seem like she was always in control, regardless if she actually was or not. I now know that I can't always be what she is and it's her fault I can't. The issue one end of my life she made impossible to achieve. I can never be as firmly as her because of what she's done for me. I will never get to go through the trials and tribulations she has. Over the years, mother has taught me how to be as heavy as she was, but at the same time, her doing so prevented me from being that strong myself.