My Mumbling Thoughts

My mother is the strongest person I know. She has struggled for the majority of her life and yet she still stands, she still wakes up every morning, she still continues to go on with life every single day trying to make it a little easier on herself. True, we haven't always seen eye to eye, but what kid always agrees with their parent? You know, unless they're like that creepy robot kid. Of course we're going to argue and have disagreements and I'll march off in a huff because gah! parents just don't understand!

I have never cursed Momma ever. I'm actually afraid what she would do. Probably hit me. I've only raised my voice at her one time in a proper shouting match which scared me, and shocked the hell out of her. Not even an hour later we were both in her room crying and I was apologizing over and over for being so disrespectful.

But even though we argue and we don't agree all the time, she is the one person in the world whose opinion matters most to me. I know it kills her that I'm so far away and it must seem like I must have abandoned everything I know by living over here; she doesn't like London. She visited once for a couple of days and "didn't see what I liked about it".

"You need to give it a proper chance, Momma. You can't just stay in Central for three days doing the tourist thing and walk away thinking that's London. It's not. You should come to my uni, see where I live, go to the neighboring towns. You'll see. London is a lovely place."

"It's dirty and they don't have AC. I have menopause, don't they know this?"

Just because she doesn't like the city, though, doesn't mean that she doesn't love to brag about her eldest daughter that moved away and is studying to be a writer. She tells me that she goes to work and tells everyone how I did it all by myself, how she didn't help with anything except signing on the dotted line, which was a mission in itself. And she tells them to wait, because one day, just you wait and see, her daughter is going to have the best selling book on the shelves.

Oh, how she loves to exaggerate; but I swell with pride knowing how happy she is and how proud she is of me. I am her Wee One. And when she's feeling really good and wants to annoy me, she calls me Manta, which I hate but secretly love.

Our relationship these days is a lot stronger and healthier. After I went back this past Christmas, we had a long talk about things and I just kept repeating to her, I'm twenty-two now, Momma. I'm twenty-two. I'm twenty-two. I'm not her little girl any more, and when I say I don't want to do something (like move to New York), I don't have to, because I'm twenty-two. She has to listen and respect my decisions, just like I do hers. Now we talk for hours like adults, and I'm even brave enough to slip in the odd curse word or two in our conversations.

"Samantha Leigh," she'll say to me in her motherly tone.

"What? It's true. He looked like shit."

"Well there's no need for you to say it like that."

"You forget that I learned it from you."

Which is true. I get everything from her. Everything I know and everything I was taught, I learned from her. I am the spitting image of her when she was my age. I remember a portrait that used to hang on my grandma's wall in her small mill house in Ranlo, North Carolina. It was Momma sat in one of those poses that painters of the 70's made people sit in, with her hands folded neatly in her lap. She was wearing a pink cardigan, her hair short and bobbed, generally like how I wear mine, and when I saw it I was startled by how similar I resembled her. I am my mother's daughter no doubt.

Aside from her physical attributes, I gained her stubborness, her ability to clean a bathroom like nobody's business, her shyness, her boldness once we get over the shyness, and yes, even a bit of her strength that I admire so much. Although, there are some things that I'm sure I got from my father even though he split when I was only young, like my smoking and my heavy drinking. Momma has never been a fan of The Drink, and she has never inhaled any kind of smoke the entire time she has been living on this planet, even though Grandma used to smoke two packs of Camels every day up until her heart attack. But daddy smoked, and she made a comment about how we smoked the same kind of cigarettes when she took them away from me when I was sixteen. I believe that a big part of who I am now is based on how I was nurtured, by sometimes you can't help what nature engraves inside of you and fall victim to the statistics.

Come July 31st, it will be Momma's fiftieth birthday. It's strange to think about, because as far as I've ever known she has always been forty-two in my mind. But this birthday seems big for some reason. Maybe it's because she's entering into a new decade. She's leaving her forties, the decade when she retired from the Air Force, of us moving away from North Carolina, and the decade when Mel and I were teenagers giving her hell. Her fifties is a new era of her getting her business law degree, earning the most money she has ever earned her entire life, and her two girls turning into two women that are embarking on a new change in their lives as well. Everything is different and I feel it.

I remember one night, Momma and I were looking through pictures as we occasionally do. We both get sentimental and like to sit down and remember how life was Back Then. Mel doesn't share the same kind of feelings, so usually it's just Momma and me, sat downstairs on the couch flipping through the years when we lived in that house in California, or that other house in Colorado. I remember the house in North Dakota. I loved that one the most. I'll stop on one of the birthday pictures of when I was small with half of my body lying across the table with chocolate icing on my fingers, and there's Mel sat off to the side with chocolate icing on her face and her tongue sticking out a little bit.

"Yeah, that's when we were poor and I had to make all of your cakes," Momma said with a little laugh.

"Are you kidding?" I said to her. "I loved those cakes. They were so much fun to make. My favorite part was spelling out Happy Birthday with those sugar letters. Those were awesome."

"I suppose you were young so you didn't care or know any better. There are better cakes out there."

"Yeah, but those cakes don't matter. I'd take a Momma-made cake over some crappy store bought cake any day."

And it's true. If I could, every single one of our birthdays would be celebrated like that photograph.

To celebrate the big 5-0, Momma and Mel are driving down to North Carolina to visit Janice. If I'm not mistaken, Janice is making her birthday cake (with Splenda since Janice is diabetic; everything that's sweet is made with Splenda in Janice's house). Mel jokes and says that Momma is turning half a century old, Momma tells her to wait until she gets to be her age and she won't find it so funny, and I just sit and listen to them argue over petty things like they always do and can only hope that my momma has fifty more good years ahead of her.