The Falling Oak - Learning How to Die
Chapter 45

Copyright© 2018 by Darian Wolfe

May 12th, 2019

Hello Everyone,

Here in the states it is Mother’s Day. So Happy Mother’s Day to all of our mothers out there. Going with the day, I decided to talk about my mother. I’ve said some harsh things about her here from time to time. I’ve also stated that the last fifteen years or so of her life we were able to build a good relationship with each other. It wasn’t until my early twenties that I began to understand that my mom made what she thought was the best decisions she could. Once, I understood that she had done her honest best I couldn’t stay angry at her.

I thought I would share a bit of her back story. It starts with my grandmother. The location is the mountains of Kentucky. The year is 1907 and at the age of 18 she is getting married. The man is abusive so she divorced him. Due to the harsh living conditions, she outlives a couple of other husbands and then meets my grandfather. Near the end of 1930 my grandfather is kidnapped in broad daylight by co-workers on payday. His fellow workers wouldn’t help him because they were afraid of the kidnappers.

Not only did they steal my grandfather’s money, they tortured him to death for the fun of it. They shot him seven times when they were finished and then for good measure threw his body into my grandmother’s front yard. My grandmother was pregnant with my mother at the time. Being it was Kentucky during the depression a woman with children had to have a husband to survive. Grandma remarried so my mother was raised by step fathers. Grandma was 78 by the time I was born and I have no idea what number that husband was. He died when I was four-ish. I was scared of him. He was so old he looked like a skeleton with skin and he moved.

So my mom’s early childhood was a Kentucky farm during the Great Depression. She told us one year for Christmas she got a single orange and that was it. No Christmas dinner, no other gifts. A single orange was the whole kit and caboodle. When she was about twelve she went to a sleepover. Some guys came over and one of them wanted to have sex with her. When she refused, he got angry and grabbed a shotgun and tried to kill her. One of her friends tried to knock the shotgun away. Instead of the blast hitting her chest it hit her knee. It permanently disfigured her leg and gave her a pronounced limp. This was during the era of legs. A women’s beauty was judged by the shape, length, ect of her legs. We were just recently in the era of booty. Where it was all about that ass. To anybody being disfigured sucks. What does it mean to a 12-ish year old girl coming into her own sexuality to have her “Prime” feature disfigured. My mother never got past it.

I don’t know much about her life until she’s about 22. I know she had an affair with a married man because that’s how I got my half brother who’s like 15 years older than me. I know that the two of them struggled for several years. Sometimes there was only enough food in the house for him to eat, so she went hungry. I was so dense I didn’t put two plus two together until I was a parent and I either had a really small portion, or choose not to eat, so my wife and kids could have full stomachs that she had done the same for my sister and I when we were little. I remember it now, how she would put the plates on the table and then turn her back so she didn’t have to watch us eat because she was hungry too. We’d ask her when she was going to have hers she’d say “I’ll have mine later.” There never was a later for her that day. My mother made so many mistakes that it was ridiculous, but she passed the acid test. She put my sister and I first. As a child, I have no memory of being truly hungry. I may not have been able to have seconds but she made damn sure we had firsts.

 
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