A Letter to my Mom...

Dear Mom-

You know I am never at a loss for words.  Sometimes when we are out in public, I just sit back and watch you interact with people and know that I definitely get that from you.  You do not know a stranger.  One of the things I love most about you.

In just a few weeks I will have been back in Illinois going on 10 years.  It just doesn’t seem possible.  I don’t think it is any secret that even though I was miserable with my employers at the time, that I moved back to Illinois to “help” take care of you.  In some aspects, I feel like I have helped “raise” you and I don’t mean that in the sense like you raised me.  Let me explain…

You stopped in to work yesterday and your spirit was gone.  The one you have tried so hard to get back.  The one that YOU CONTROL.  No one else can take that away from you. 

There are so many things that I love about you it would take days to list them all, but there are also things that I don’t love and the reason that I don’t love them is because I can see myself doing the same things and frankly I don’t want any human being or thing to ever cause me so much distress.

Right now at this very moment, although you are probably the happiest I have ever seen you, you are also probably in the worst shape physically.  I know what the problem is.  You know what the problem is.  It frustrates the hell out of me that you let it control so much of your life.  I am not here to preach, I am not good at that anyway.  I am simply here to remind you of a few things.

For the first time in your life, you have something to call your own.  Mainly your life, but you have your own home.  That you have created with your own vision.  It’s not someone else’s that you are borrowing just to live in…it is yours.  For more years than I care to count, you were in a very dysfunctional environment.  I am grateful you and Dad didn’t fight, or scream, or physically abuse one another.  But we all know words can be as harmful as a hand.  My point is you two simply co-existed, quite separately in our home, thus proving the point that a house does NOT make a home.  It took you a plethora of years and many times of being told to just leave, to finally do just that.  I do not care what took place afterwards.  I do not care how you and Terry arrived at the same place together again after all these years.  It took a courage that you never knew you had to finally stand up for yourself and on your own two feet.

Nothing about this divorce, that was supposed to be over almost a year ago, has been easy.  On any of us, but especially you.  A lot of things haven’t “gone your way” per se but I think you are forgetting about the important things and making yourself sick over the details.

I want you to think back to when you were still married to my father.  You are no longer in that situation.  You got yourself out of an unhealthy environment.  A situation that was making you very sick and almost cost you your life on more than one occasion.  I know that you still don’t have most ALL of “your things” and that is completely not acceptable, but the system is not designed to do the right thing unfortunately.  I know this may not seem like much consolation, but what you do have is far greater than the “things” you are still fighting for, at least they are to me.

I never dreamed I would see you smile and laugh.  I never dreamed that someone else would sit with you in the hospital besides me.  I never dreamed you would have a little place in this world to call your own without having to live under someone else’s rules or thumb.  I never dreamed I would see you as the strong individual that you are and always have been.  I am not asking you to give up and forget about what is yours, I am asking you to focus on what you have accomplished so that you don’t make yourself so sick that you cannot get back again, because you are almost there. 

You have a pattern you follow and you follow it to a tee.  You get yourself so upset about things that are out of your control that you make yourself so much sicker than you already are and we don’t need extra help in that area. 

When I saw you yesterday and realized your spark was gone I knew what road we were headed down and I want you to stop it now, before it is too late.  For as long as I have been alive you have allowed someone else to control how you feel.  It took you 38 years but you finally had enough…GET HER BACK.  She isn’t that far away.  You are better and stronger than this.  Is it fair that you have had to fight so hard to get to this point?  No.  I know this is annoying and unfair and needs to stop, trust me; no one wants it over more than I do.  But when it gets like this, I want you to sit down and reflect on where you were versus where you are now and trust that God will see you through this.  It is exactly what you would tell me to do.  I need to see that from you. 

The truth is I have not left you because I didn’t know if you were going to be okay all these years.  Now I know that you are going to be okay and I can spread my wings again and fly.  I can’t do that if you are still letting certain things tear you down. 

You are an amazingly beautiful mother, woman, sister, aunt, and friend.  I want people to say, you Tiffany, are so much like your mother…I don’t want that to mean I make myself sick over stupid people and stupid rules.  I cannot imagine my life without you in it and I don’t even want to entertain the idea of it.  I want you to show your children and your grandchildren and even your siblings that even though you have had to fight tooth and nail, you will come out of it with your head held high, because you can. 

I do not think anything about this is right.  I only know that you are my mother and he is my father and whatever life you two have left to live needs to be spent enjoying yourselves.  I realize he is the one preventing that.  He said he would make this hard and apparently he meant it.  I don’t know what the answer is, I don’t know what to tell you to do, I just know that you are in no physical, mental or emotional condition to deal with this and I simply cannot watch you wither away to the shell you used to be.  I just can’t. 

I love you with all of my heart.  I would give up my own life for you to find yours.  Please dig deep and find the strength you need to get through this.  And no, this probably hasn’t affected others that care about you in the same way, because I have spent so much time trying to “raise you up.”