So, just to let everyone know up front, this is not one of those cool news stories about things happening with the website or novels. This is just a personal blog about life and shit.
I have been trying to knock out the sequel to The Night Menagerie, but have been running into some issues. The biggest thing is that my mother died in February. (I am officially an orphan now.) This is my second go at writing an obituary. I did one right after she passed but to include anything more then three lines was going to cost close to a thousand bucks so that one was pretty sparse.
Truth be told, to say this is an obituary is a misnomer. I think I am more like trying to get a handle on my relationship with her and how I am going to remember her. We had a bit of a complicated history. We had good times, she kept a roof over my head, and there was usually food in the house. But there were bad times too, when I was young, she had an affection for discipline and physical punishment. She liked to manipulate her children, which was something that never changed. Then there was when I came out, which resulted in her saying Oh my God,” over and over for a whole hour. She never really got better. She made some attempts, but for every time she said my chosen name, there were six or seven times she refused. The fact that she believed the lgbtq+ community was a bunch of aggressive perverts was hard to handle. I would love to blame that on an elderly person watching too much Fox TV, but it was something she believed since at least the 70s.
I write all of this not to vilify her but because it is what I am wrestling with. She never cast me out of the family, but every time I visited her, it was just a reminder of how I was not really accepted. Some people tell me I should be grateful for what I got. I had not been able to decide how much I should push things, and we were still in the in-between state when she passed. Suddenly. When my father passed, it was almost a relief; he had been comatose for months, so I had no illusions that we had a lot of time. My mother celebrated her 90th birthday and then was gone a week later.
I thought there would be relief when she passed as well, but then there come random times when out of nowhere I am crying. She had so many issues, and while I know in my head that a lot of that came from how she was abused. A part of me is still that child running out the front door to avoid the repercussions of bad grades on my report card. But a part of me is also the person who misses my mom and just wishes she had called me Kathryne once and meant it.
I guess I need to file this under ‘the time heals all things’ category. I just wish I could categorize her as a sinner or a saint, an abuser or a protector, accepting or hating, but at the end of the day, nobody is just one thing.