It’s 2 a.m. as I write this and I can’t sleep. I miss my mom. She died on July 6, 2012 and I never got to tell her goodbye or hug her one last time. I received an email from my sister telling me to call her, and when I did, she told me she was gone. Just like that.
One of my favorite memories of my mom is from when I was about five years old and she’d sing and dance with me holding my hands while she laughed. Neither one of us could sing or dance but we sure had fun not being able to sing or dance.
My mother was a good woman. She was married to my father for 50 years and as a housewife she devoted all of her time and all of herself to raising me and my sister. The title of “Housewife” and “Stay At Home Mom” is so under-rated. She was a nurse when she met my dad and she gave up her career to devote all of her time to her marriage and family. When she was 50 years old she went back to school and obtained a bachelor’s degree. I used to think that she did it just to make me look like an underachieving loser.
My mother didn’t speak to me for the last 12 years of her life because she couldn’t deal with the fact that I became a criminal. She internalized my behavior as a failure of parenting on her part instead of realizing that the mental health and resulting substance abuse issues I had were the result of genetics, and not bad parenting. She just didn’t know how to deal with the tragedy that my life had become. Like all of us, she was just doing the best she could with what she had when it came to coping with things. When I realized this, and realized that I didn’t do too well at coping with things myself, it was easy for me to forgive her for shutting me out of her’s and my dad’s life.
My mother also never understood that, sometimes in this life, what we do does not necessarily represent who we truly are. Our behavior does not reflect our true heart. And none of us is the sum total of our mistakes. St. Paul talked about this is the book of Romans of the new testament of the Holy Bible. He said, “My heart loves God, yet my mind and my hands continue to sin.” (paraphrased.) This is especially true for people who have alcohol and substance abuse problems. For years, my behavior did not align with how my heart truly felt. Unfortunately, these two things never aligned until after about two years in a federal penitentiary and my mom went Home before she got to witness this.
It’s hard to love someone who won’t love you back. But I learned. For years, I wrote her once a month or so from various prison cells. Sometimes I’d have to put the curtain up over my bars for privacy while I wrote her because my eyes would leak water. In those letters I gave her the one thing that I’d denied her all those years…myself. My love.
So now it’s 2 a.m. and I’m all alone in this cell missing and loving my mom. I have my headphones on and just got done bumping into my locker and my bunk as I danced to Katy Perry. The feds may have my body in this Alcatraz-looking prison, but my spirit is thousands of miles away from here. Soaring. Hoping. Dancing. Waiting until the day that I can hold my mom’s hands again and dance with her and watch her laugh.
I love you mom. And I always will. It never stops.
*Originally published in December of 2012 on the Bank Robber’s Blog on murderslim.com
