Helped Mom Move This Morning...

The evening has been a real... um, challenege, lol.

I could go into it, but it would use too much jargon that would have to be explained, and trust me: the explanation and jargon wouldn't make for a very interesting read.

So let's just say that one department did their job poorly, and I felt the need to compensate, which put me back 4 and a half hours or from my regular duties. (That's a conservative estimate, if anything.)

Knowing that I was helping my Mom move out of her apartment after work, My Genius Friend Dave joked that I would be thankful that I was only doing manual labor at that point. This comment proved to be prophetic! (And yet, we never win the lottery... What's up with THAT?!)

Anyway...

I use this blog as a journal, to capture glimpses into the Human Condition, and this entry is very much about that. I'm not making judgment, but merely observing, so that perhaps one day I might re-read this entry and attain actual understanding.

Mom has always been protective of her sons. (Brian & me.)

I am, perhaps, telling someone else's story here, a story that is not truly mine to tell. But I need to understand this, and so I am going to go out on a limb and tell it here, hoping that I don't over-step my personal boundaries.

My mom discovered in a previous marriage (her first) that she is not able to bear children. That guy was a fuck-hole. (My interpretation; I never met him, so I may be really off-base here; but this is MY bog not his, so screw him.) Then she met a man for whome this was not a problem -- my Pops.

But before that, just before that, and after that she had this Dream Guy whom she has known since she was, like, 14 years old. They were forced apart when she was a kid, Fate stepped in and separated them before she met my dad, and then Fate stepped in again and re-introduced them after my dad had passed away.

He is now her husband!!!

I like the guy! He's true and blunt, and he couldn't NOT speak his mind if his life depended on it, lol!

But he lives in Louisiana.

Now, I'm a Texan, born and bred. I lived in L.A. for the better part of a year, but I AM a Texan. If your state have the degree of devotion my state has (and I'll bet it does) then let me illustrate what being a Texan means by way of anecdote:

One of my very best friends, Kelly, decided he wanted both his ears pierced. He decided later in life (in his early 30s) as opposed to in his teens -- like the rest of us -- so he waited until his Halloween visit last year to get his ears pierced HERE, of all places. I'm serious, he went into a seedy 6th Street establishment rather than one of the seen-it-a-hundred-times joints that inhabit Hollywood Boulevard because of this reason: He knew that his Texan buddies would accuse him of "going all Hollywood" if he did it in L.A..

And the sad part is this: He's CORRECT, lol.

However... Having both his ears pierced HERE means we have no ammunition with which to chide and ridicule him, lol!

(A VERY hoopy frood, my friend Kelly!)

So now my Mom is moving out of state (even if it's just 6 hour's drive away, lol) to live with my step-dad.

She's NO LONGER GOING TO BE A TEXAN! I mean, yeah, she was born and raised here, and lived most of her life here... BUT STILL! She's living out her Golden Years IN ANOTHER STATE, lol!

But you know what?

That's cool with me and my brother.

Yes, we're Texans... But we're also devoted sons, and what makes Mom happy is a beautiful, beautiful thing!!! (Seriously, I've sent her then boyfriend/new husband emails just thanking him for the joy he has brought into our mom's life these last couple of years!)

So today, after 10 and a half hours of a "challenging" shift, I helped my mom and her new husband move the rest of her stuff into a U-Haul so she could begin the process of becoming a Louisianian (or, you know, non-Texan).

Backtracking a bit: Ever since Mom knew she would eventually be moving, she's been giving Brian and me things. I definitely got the sense that she was trying to set us up for after the move. She has ALWAYS taken very meticulous care of us. I dare say that into our 30s, Brian and I have always known that if we get deep enough into trouble, Mom will bail us out. There was even a point at which Mom and Dad and Brian and I were living together, not because there was so much room in our 2-bedroom apartment, but because Brian & I had gotten ourselves into so much financial trouble that we needed bailing out.

But one of the GREATEST things she and Dad EVER did was to tell Brian and me that we needed to get our own place, because she and Dad were moving into a 1-bedroom apartment.

This was great because (1) this let a couple of kids-at-heart have their own "tree house fort" in which to do as they like, and (2) this forced us to come to terms with some (financial) realities that only living on your own can do.

And STILL, Mom would help us out anyway she could. For the first several months she would take us to Cost-Co and buy us a couple months' worth of groceries, to make sure we were well-fed. She took care of our dental bills, our cars... If there was ANY problem, we always knew that we could call Mom to bail us out.

But something began to happen over the last few years...

Brian and I began to WANT TO bail OURSELVES out of any fixes we found ourselves in. As it happens, when you're not living under Mom's roof, you begin to realize how much Mom is over-extending herself by helping you out of messes you got yourself into.

So Brian and I started sorting our own shite out.

(Yeah, we're late bloomers... The Edwardses a VERY protective family...)

We've repositioned ourselves so that we will (knock on wood) be able to bail OURSELVES out of the next crisis.

But here's the thing: Mom are MOMS.

Over the last week, as Mom has packed up her apartment and prepared for her Big Move to her next phase of Life, she keeps GIVING US THINGS, lol! All beautiful, and all things Brian and I are happy to accept... But still... It's as though Mom can't help trying to think of EVERY way she can prepare us for her going off and living her life the way she wants, lol!

Brian and I are, of course, merely happy that she's so happy! We see ourselves as independant adults who will sink or swim according to our own reactions at any given moment.

But for Mom, we will ALWAYS be Carolyn's Boys. (Which is really nice in itself, hehe.)

So this morning, I swing by after work, to help her and my step-dad ( I have a STEP-DAD, lol!!!) load up the U-Haul for their trip today to her new home.

At Mom's request, I pick up some donuts on the way to her soon-to-be-ex-apartment. Knowing what a coffee junky I am, she has some coffee made and ready.

She asks if I want some.

"Yeah, baby!" or something like that, is my reply.

She pours me a cup, warns me that it's hot...

...the cup tips over toward me...

...I dodge and get a mildly-heated thumb in the process of righting the cup again...

..and Mom almost starts crying!

I tell her that it's okay, that I'm fine.

She says that it's horrible to harm your child.

I hug her as tight as I can and tell her I'm okay, it's all alright.

But she still can't believe she burned her child.

This lasts a few seconds, but it feels like an eternity.

The Writer part of my brain reasons that when someone reacts overly-emotionally to a situation that doesn't warrant such a strongly emotional response, that person must be reacting to emotions RELATED to that situation that they haven't been fully vented or expressed.

I tell the Writer part of my brain to go take a flying leap, and hug my mommy, and tell her it's all okay.

This chick was unable to bare children, and so chose to ADOPT... Score 1 for her.

When she chose which children to adopt, she chose a cat who was taken from his biological mother so soon that he might never be able to form a normal child-mother bond ever -- my brother -- and a boy who was so old, comparatively, that the sociological issues he had would take nothing short of YEARS to undo and reprogram -- me. And it DID take me some 5 years to deal with my "rage issues". And it wasn't until the last couple of years that I was able to see my Mom for the woman she is: A chick who LIKES TO LAUGH! (Brian and my friend Kelly saw this when they were just kids, but I was too enveloped in my own Teen Angst to notice it.)


Score, like, 100 for her.

My mom has taken on emotional baggage that she did not IN ANY WAY create, and tried to FREE my brother and me from that baggage every day of every month of every year since we became her children.

And now she's moving away -- out of state -- and I suspect that her instincts have her still trying to protect us.

The coffee thing...

Here's the thing: If the coffee HAD spilled on me, it would have HURT. No lyin', that was some hot coffee, lol.

But in the interim of Mom doing her Mom Thang...

My li'l bro' has taught me The Tao Of Jeet Kune Do. This was in my early-to-mid-20s, when I was about 50 pounds lighter than I am. But the beauty of Bruce Lee's principal of martial arts is that it adapts to who you are, how old you are, where you are and in what circumstances you find yourself.

So one of the secret martial arts trick I have learned is How To Move My Body Quickly Out Of The Path Of Harm, lol. I instinctively jumped back quickly enough that only my thick, leather boots tasted the boilding coffee.

And here my mom was, so concerned that she had in some way accidentally harmed her son!

Poor dear woman!

It was odd for me, because I didn't instinctively know how to make her feel better. :(

There was a moment when I confessed my spirituality to my dear, DEAR friend Kelly, and I could autaully see him mentally groping for a pre-ordained response to my (must-have-been) shocking disclosure... I responded (quite literally, if memory serves) to his response and we laughed, and we were back on familiar territory again. But he had been shaken, and I hadn't known how to deal with what he seemed to be feeling.

Here my mom was close to tears about almost "harming her child" and I was lost.

I don't know what she was thinking, or had been thinking since she knew she is going to move -- she and Pops seemed to believe that one doesn't show "weakness" or uncertainty to ones' offspring.

What was that poor woman enduring that she WILL NEVER tell me about? Is she afraid that Brian and I can't make it on our own? Is she afraid that her happiness comes at the expence of Brian's and my happiness?

I'll probably never know.

But in that moment when my mom thought she had tipped a cup of hot coffee all over me, I got this sense of unreasoning LOVE for me. Like a lioness protecting her cub!

And on the one hand it was so sad, to see my mom hurt so badly by something that COULD HAVE, but DIDN'T, hurt her oldest son...

And on the other hand, it was SO BEAUTIFUL, to know that no matter how old I am I will always be that defenseless 8-year-old boy that she swore to raise and protect for as long as she lives!!!


The thing about a Glimpse Into The Human Condition is that more often than if offers up explanations and understanding, it more often offers up more questions. Questions that you accept may never be answered.

May you take what you will from this enigmatic entry.

:)