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Her

The new grownup

By LilPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
2
My mom

My mom didn’t show up until I was three or four. My dad was a single, working father who lived with his own mother(so he could have free child care), and my sister and I had trust issues. Our birth mother had left us alone with someone who hurt little girls so she could buy drugs. Even when we weren’t alone, we might as well have been. We were sleeping in dirty laundry to keep warm, or scrounging for food because nobody fed us, or running naked into Chico streets because nobody was sober enough to keep an eye on the front door. When my dad found out how bad things were, he took us away from her. He felt bad that we didn’t have a mother anymore, so he went looking for one.

Then she came.

She tried to hug us- to hug us... Can you believe the sheer audacity? Only our dad and our grans hugged us. When other people hugged us, bad things happened. We turned our heads away, kept our eyes distant, and stiffly waited for it to be over every time. But she never stopped. For nearly eighteen years, she never stopped trying to hug us. She also cooked. She cooked weird food that didn’t come in boxes or fast food wrappers, and some of it was green. The weird, green food actually touched the other colors of food, too. It was so gross.

But...

She still cooked for us.

She was around so often that we even started seeing her on school nights. Our dad seemed content to keep her, and she told us we could call her “Shawn”. We were ok with that. Grownups who we were allowed to call by their first names certainly weren’t “forever” grownups. We didn’t need any more of those around. Then, one day, she brought us some skirts. They were stiff and flowery, but we wore them anyway. She couldn’t always afford things like new clothes.

But...

She could make them for us, herself.

Eventually, after we’d moved away from our grans, we realised we were stuck with this “Shawn” lady. We were all living together, the four of us, and dad told us to call her “Shawn-mom”. We didn’t like that at all. We didn’t need a mom. I still rejected her hugs and her cooking, but my sister, my sweet little sister... She started returning those hugs. Her new favorite food was chicken and rice- something only she cooked. And my sister started calling her “mom”. Not where she could hear it, of course, but I heard it, when my sister played make-believe. My sister would pretend our dad was a business man, and Shawn-mom was just “mom”, a mom who hugged us and cooked chicken and rice for dinner. After that, it wasn’t long before my sister had fallen completely under that woman’s spell, but not me. I knew better. She was still new, and new grownups are bad.

But...

Her hands were so soft.

One day I skinned my knee, and it hurt so bad I was sure I was gonna die. Dad wasn’t home when I limped back with my scraped-up knee, but she was. Her hands were broken-out and cracked from washing dishes, but they were so soft and gentle as she put a Flintstones bandage over my wound. Maybe she wasn’t so bad. The next week we got chicken pox, and guess who made us soup and read us stories? Yeah. She was still around.

But...

I wasn’t gonna call her “mom”.

She was there when I started my period, and the time I beat up Emma Something-or-other for picking on my little sister, and she was the one who rage-marched over to my school when I was being targeted by a racist teacher. She was there for my first crush, and my one-hundredth, and she encouraged my creativity and made me clothes. She also cooked weird food and tried to hug me, but maybe that wasn’t so bad.

But...

I still couldn’t call her “mom”.

Could I?

Then I did. It felt weird coming out of my mouth, like it was too big a word to push out easily. I waited to see if using that word would make something bad happen. And waited. Nothing. She never reacted. Had I waited too long? Maybe she didn’t want me anymore, so she didn’t care what I called her. I kept using that word, and for years I felt like an imposter. That word wasn’t for me to use. I kept using it anyway. I was a rebel.

But...

It became natural.

Huh. Who knew? I guess that word is for me. I guess “mom” can mean something good. I guess even broken little girls are allowed a good thing, now and then. And she is. Good, I mean. Not perfect, but good. My little girl eyes couldn’t see it, but my mom was a warrior. She loved me when I couldn’t love her, she fought for me when I needed a protector, and, small as it may seem to those who have never been without, she fed me and clothed me.

I know, now, that trying to love us must have been incredibly hard, and sometimes maybe heartbreaking. We never thanked her for the hand-made clothing she’d spent hours on, or the holiday gifts she bought us instead of paying bills. We didn’t realize how special it was that she took us to see elders and hear their stories, and we certainly didn’t thank her for the dirty knees we got from growing our own vegetables. There was no thank you for the safety, consistency, and time she provided two broken little girls. And we were broken.

Until she came.

parents
2

About the Creator

Lil

I’m a socially awkward indigenous woman who sometimes wants to get a story off her chest. And sometimes I just want frybread.

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