And in This Corner…The Defender!

Why am I fighting so hard for my mother?

After all, she has many advantages and advocates in her battle against mental illness, yet she has told me she's given up. I don't want to believe this.

I would describe my mother as a fighter - a scrapper.

For years, certain stories about her have been a part of my familial fabric, as comfortable and well-known as the fraying knots on a favorite quilt.

"They told me I wouldn't live past 12," she said of a congenital heart defect. "I sure showed them."

She had a high school counselor who frostily discouraged her educational dreams. "That ole heifer told me I 'wasn't college material.'" Mom graduated from the College of the Ozarks with a bachelor's in elementary education and later met my father in seminary, assured of her ability for foreign missions. "I sure showed her."

"When your daddy was a preacher at Beaumont, there was this one woman who kept trying to pray with him by herself, away from everybody else. Your daddy just didn't understand what she was trying to do. So I took the bus over to her house. When she opened the door, I told her, "You better leave my husband alone."

"I sure whooped her."

Larger than life - perhaps incredulously so. After all, Southerners are fans of hyperbole. Exaggeration so often enhances how we weave our tales. I can't tell you how many times I've imagined the possibilities in these stories. I picture my mother, petite, with fiery auburn locks. She's sitting daintily on a bench, waiting for a bus so she can ride across town to defend her matrimonial territory. Regardless of my personal opinion of her actions, I am overcome by the hilarity of the possibilities. I wonder, what of the denouement? Was she tired after delivering a Jerry Springer-style throwdown? Did she perhaps walk off her anger following the confrontation? Maybe she nursed a wound of her own, a scratch, briefly considering it in the reflection of her Avon compact?

I'll never know the truth about any of it. But it doesn't matter.

My sister and I hold close our memories of her protecting and defending us, like a fighter - a scrapper. We often discuss how to leverage our pain against her inability to engage with us. We understand that she has an illness that is robbing her of her ability to relate. Yet - it's a hard thing for a daughter not to be a daughter anymore. It's a hard thing to be a compassionate yet dispassionate caregiver.

"Remember when she used to care about our lives?" I asked my sister. "I miss that so much."

"I do remember," she said. "I remember the time I got the only B I have ever received. It was fourth-grade music class, and Mrs. (Name redacted to protect this teacher's reputation from the irritation of this writer) told me that I didn't deserve an A because I was some kind of 'gangleader' who had too many keychains and influenced other kids in a bad way."

"She said WHAT?"

I thought about my sister in fourth grade - quiet, loyal, creative, funny. An intelligent and insightful kid, barely a year out from losing her father, usually clothed in oversized hand-me-downs. A kid living in poverty whose teacher hastily mischaracterized her.

"Oh yes she did. And I told Mom about it. So Mom went to the school and talked to her. I don't know what she said, but not only did I end up with an A, but I also got free piano lessons."

Oh, my heart. My heart.

My sister needed a defender. And so my mom got into the ring. A fighter - a scrapper.

I promised myself that I would remember this story the next time I have to steel against the pain. Why am I fighting so hard for my mother? Because she fought so hard for us. Because she taught us to fight. This is why.

January 22, 2018