#nickleback
My mom was always horrible at hiding things. She couldn’t hide from me that we were poor, though she rarely tried. She referred to food stamps often and we lived in a trailer park. She told us right off the bat we were getting toys for tots stuff for Christmas one year. There was a little interests sheet she had to fill out so they could try to match us with toys that would hopefully fit our desires. Present wise, it was bad. They gave us dollar store dolls with hair that came out too easily and plastic that dented at the slightest touch. They were impossible to fix - like an off-brand bottled of water. It wasn’t that toys were cheap that made it bad, it was that we didn’t play with dolls. I was probably eleven or twelve and my sister was in high school and it just wasn’t us. We don’t have pictures of that Christmas, probably because we couldn’t afford the film.
On years she saved and bought presents, I always knew where she hid those, too. At first it was in the cabinets, above the washer and drier, shoved behind towels and double or triple wrapped in Kmart bags. After she realized that spot was useless, she hid them in the nook in her closet that expanded past the boundaries of the sliding doors. Then it was the shed dad built us that was kept locked for the mass amount of tools she housed there. There was a spare, though, and I knew right where it was. Finally she moved them to the toolbox in the bed of her little Mazda pick-up, the white paint chipped and rusted. She had the only key and while we both knew they were there, we also knew there was no getting in there.
What she tried to hide most and what I believe I always hid my knowledge of, was how lonely she was. I’m a nostalgic sort. I would go through the whole house and dust and touch and inspect. The empty Huckleberry Cream Soda bottles and the ankh mom had molded from clay. The bamboo goblets and the 3D puzzle statue of King Tut. Mom’s jewelry box. Her drawers full of notebooks with lyrics and poems I thought she had written. Instead they were songs she’d heard and lingered on, written word for word and filled hundreds of pages. All of which were yellowed. Dawning from before my birth up to the years I first found them.
She worked a lot. At one point, she was the manager of three separate departments in Kmart: auto, hardware, and toys. I would go in before and after school and help her front board games or Matchbox cars. They laid her off mere months before her ten year anniversary but while she was there, she would come home, kick off her shoes, and sit in her bedroom, leaving my sister and I to occupy ourselves.
She hid her chocolate stash in her dresser drawers - easy. She’d go to work and I’d hang out it her room, watch movies, and chip away at it. I’d stand on her bed and belt out Panic! at the Disco.
I’ve always had a lot of anxiety. When I was younger, I dealt with some anxiety induced insomnia. I would lay wide away in my bed and any noise was a sign of an intruder. That creak in the linoleum was not the cat, it was the systematic murder of my mother and my sister. If I were to step outside of my bedroom, I would find them both in their rooms, dead. Blood everywhere. I would wait for an hour after the last violent noise,walk silently to my door and open it slowly, looking for signs of the massacre I’d imagined, then walk down the hall to my mom’s room and open her cracked door even more slowly.
There she’d be, fast asleep in her ragged red flannel in the fetal position, the blankets disheveled. And every time I knew, there would be no sleep for me if I didn’t sleep there. So I’d crawl in. Sometimes, she would turn over and wrap her arms around me and sometimes she would tell me to go back to my room, though I don’t know that I ever actually did.
Later, after I told her why I came to her room, she said I should have told her. She would’ve done something. There was nothing she could have done, though, beyond letting me sleep there. Letting me make sure she was safe.
I was able to predict her mood by the songs we listened to on the way to town every morning. If it was Alanis, she was angry - ramped up and ready to take on the bullshit that is misogyny. If it was Train, she was hopeful and happy, or at least content. Matchbox Twenty was for when she was unloved and unwanted.
She was never either of those things, but being loved and wanted by your daughter is never quite the same.
When Jess and I grew tall, my small mother took to calling us her Amazon Women. Her protectors. Her girls. It was around the time she actually started to shrink in size and I started countering her arguments with “I can lift you."
Physically, I could. Emotionally, I’d like to think the same. The time has come and gone where I was the same age as she when she had her first daughter. I imagine myself in her position: living with an alcoholic husband and a small child and I don’t know how she did it. She was so strong.
I’ve always been better than her at hiding. The anxiety. The depression. The crushes. The outings into the desert. Bike rides into town. My sister’s secrets. And my own.
It was my last semester at University of Idaho that I realized hiding was the reason I didn’t feel connected to anyone. The reason I’d stop letting myself feel anything. I was too afraid they wouldn’t want me for whoever I was - I honestly didn’t know, anymore, who I was.
I think we shared a journey. I did mine without a husband and two crazy kids, but in the end, we both lost a lot to get back to who we are and what we truly want. It’s taken a lot for us to let ourselves have it.
It’s been years since it was just Mom and I against the world and, thankfully, she’s not lonely anymore. She finally found someone who doesn’t make her write Nicselfkleback songs in 49 cent spirals. And she replaced me with a cat that she spoils (Mom, Miss Kitten is fat, admit it to yourself). I miss her every single day, but just as I told her when I was little and showed the first signs of awful math skills: I love her. Ten to a thousand. And no manner of miles or mountains or live in boyfriends or fat cats she clearly loves more than me is going to change that.
Although this meta-photo of her might…
