Memories

In our preachers wives class our teacher wants us to tell of a good memory of our mothers at our next class. It shouldn't be that hard. Yet one or two is all I can come up with. I have a whole bank of bad memories. I mean, that can't be right can it? Are my bad memories just overwhelming the good ones? It's not like I was abused or anything. Yet I have a very limited amount of good memories. Was she the best mother, no...but I know she wasn't the worst either.

I wish she had never asked us this question because it's making me think of a lot of things that I had pushed down and out of my thoughts. It's making me reflect on some moments that I hadn't thought about as being bad, and seeing them through an adults view and thereby realizing just how bad it was. More and more moments keep popping up like that and I hate it. It's things I don't want to think about. Things about my childhood, before the age of 12, when I thought things weren't so bad. After the age of 12, forget about it, there isn't anything good I can come up with.

Like when I flipped my friends Jeep Cherokee 3 times across a highway in Dallas at 2 in the morning when I was 16, in which somehow no one was hurt (my friend had passed out after hitting her head on the roof of the car since she was sleep in the back seat and almost fell out the back hatch back when the back door ripped off, but she was alright). The cops had to take me back to the police station and kept asking me how to contact my mom so she could come and get me. I couldn't give them an answer. I had no idea where she was. That was a daily occurrence. My friends mom finally came and they let me go home with her so I wouldn't have to stay there at the station all night. And yes, staying out at 2am was a pretty regular thing for me at that age, even during school days. I had no parental guidance, sadly enough.

Once I became a Christian and I was around more families, I saw what I had been missing. Before then I didn't realize just how abnormal it was. Then it just made me sad that I didn't have the type of relationship with my mom that many other women have. After I saw how a real relationship was suppose to be it really made me sad that I didn't, and don't, have that with my own mother.

Maybe that's why that book I'm reading on Spiritual Mothering hit so close to home.