Mom, The Boss Lady

I grew up in the back rooms of restaurants, while my mother worked hard every day to earn money that afforded us a lifestyle unlike any of my friends. Both of my parents had new cars. My mother had new jewelry. We had a big screen projection television before big screen televisions were a thing. I could have as much soda as I wanted while my friends were always limited on how much they could have. I just went up to the front of the restaurant and helped myself.

But my mom… she was a bitch. Cold and distant. No one who came into restaurant liked her. They called her the ice queen.

But I knew a side of my mother that they didn’t get to see. I knew the mother who cried real tears when her granddaughter was born. I knew the mother who was quiet a lot of the time because I had a father who talked all the time. I knew a mother who was cold and distant because it hurt too much to be open to feelings in our family.

When I was 15 years old, I ran away from home and ran away from this cold and distant mother. I never understood why she wouldn’t show the real side of herself to the world. She hid behind her tshirts and long hair an pulled it back into a plain ponytail.

Yes, she was plain and simple and had no desire to be anything more. So when I started to want to wear makeup, that was not understood. When I wanted to wear tight jeans and pumps, that was no understood. When I wanted to be a writer, that wasn’t understood. Writing was a hobby, not something you did for a living.

Back and forth it went like this, grounded for life it seemed, so I left. I couldn’t take it. Everyone thought I left because of my abusive father, but in reality I left because I couldn’t take my distant mother.

For the next ten months, I spent half my time denying that I was pregnant and was going to be a mom myself. I knew I could be a better mom than mine was, but I didn’t have the things my mom had. There would be no fancy cars, jewelry, or big screened televisions.

But what there would be is a lot of love, and that’s the most priceless gift in the world.

On Mother’s Day, the year I turned 16, I called my mother on the phone for the first time in ten months and said, “I want to come home, but I’m not sure if I can?”

“Why,” she asked, “You’re not pregnant are you?”

I paused and didn’t say anything for a long time.

She said, “We have family in town for Mother’s Day, your grandmother will have to know if we let you come home tonight but we can keep it quiet from the rest of the family until we decide what to do.”

“What do you mean ‘what to do’?” I asked.

“The one thing I said about you girls growing up was that I didn’t want you to get pregnant. It was the one thing I didn’t want.”

“Well, it happened and now we have to deal with it.”

“Yes, we do,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked “Oh, my ride’s here to bring me home. Can I come home?”

“I guess so. Let me talk to your father about it but go ahead and head this way. We’ll worry about the rest when you get here.”

When the van from the crisis pregnancy center pulled up into the parking lot of the restaurant my parents owned, I saw the RV for my grandparents there. I was five months pregnant. I did not look pregnant yet.

My mother’s first words to me were, “If I had known you didn’t look pregnant, I wouldn’t have told anyone.”

My grandmother walked up to me and hugged me and said, “That’s my grandbaby in there. Nobody gives family away.”

I collapsed into a heaping sob of tears. My grandmother wanted the baby. My mother did not want the baby. What was I going to do?

My immediate family wanted to place my child for adoption. My mother said, “I would have considered an abortion if I’d known how far a long you were.”

I’d never been given a choice—it was always in my mom’s hands. My father wouldn’t even speak to me, and I assumed it was because he was angry because I was pregnant too. Eventually, it came out that he didn’t want to give the baby up for adoption either, much like his mother, he felt nobody gives family away.

When my daughter was born, a healthy, beautiful baby girl, my father came to me and said, “We never gave you much of a choice in how you could handle this. It was always ‘get rid of the baby and have a place to live or keep the baby and don’t’, and that’s not fair.”

Suddenly, with the strength of my grandmother and the voice of my father, I now have choices.

And I went to go pick up my baby three days later from the hospital. I was no the mother and the choices were mine to make and I knew I wouldn’t make the same mistakes my cold, overbearing mother had made. I wanted to be the kind of m other my grandmother had been to me.

My father took me to pick out baby clothes and bedding and a crib and a carrier and carseat. It’s amazing the amount of stuff you need to have a baby. I felt a twinge of guilt when he kept putting out more and more money for my baby, but she was his family too and as they say, it takes a village to raise a child.

At first, my mother continued her cold ways, but nothing can melt your heart faster than a baby or a grandchild, and I started to see sides of my mother I had never seen before. By the time my daughter was two years old, they were cooking together, making pudding one night, teacher my little one how to use the mixer.

I was able to stay in school and raise my daughter and go on to college. My daughter became the reason for everything I did. From working at my job to doing well in school, I wanted to set the example for her, to lead her into a better life.

Now, thirty-three years later, my daughter is in the master’s program at the local college and my mom is paying for that college for her. They are the best of friends, and my mom lost her ice queen, cold and distant ways. She’s become a new person and being a grandma had a lot to do with that.

Mothers and daughters are in interesting cross section in life and family. My daughter is everything to me, and I’m so very proud of her. My mother is proud of me now. My grandmother has passed away, but she gave me tons of support in the years leading up to her death.