“Two North” – A true Christmas story
“Two North” is a story about a Christmas when I was in grade school during a period when my mom was spending time on the psychiatric ward of our town’s hospital after trying to commit suicide to escape a physically-abusive husband. I was thirteen. It was a cataclysmic event in our lives but it brought us together into a two-person tribe like no other event ever has in my life.
I offer this story each year to my friends here at Eclectablog on Christmas as a tribute to my mother, a woman who went from being a pregnant sixteen-year old to retiring as an executive for the Chrysler Corporation in the short span of twenty years.
Much of who I am today is because of her and the lessons she taught me.
This may be read as a sad story, one full of tragedy and unhappiness. But, at the end, it’s story about the power of love to fill our lives in the midst of unhappiness and the unbreakable bonds between family members, whether it’s your biological family or, as Armistead Maupin calls it, your logical family.
Merry Christmas to all of you.
“Two North”It was Christmas night and I was warm and felt very comfortable. Maybe the most comfortable I had felt in a long time. I wasn’t in my own bed but that was okay because my mom was there and I hadn’t seen her in awhile and it was nice to be with her. I was only thirteen but when I look back on it, it seems like I was older and I guess I was in some ways. Older than I should have needed to be, I suppose.
I was laying in the darkness, mesmerized by a spacey lamp, the kind you find in head shops or at Spencer’s Gifts, designed especially for moments like this. Christmas was over and, although my memory of the day itself is lost in the fog of time, I have a vivid and distinct memory of the little bits of colored light going up and down and around and around the lamp.
We had spent the day with my aunts and uncles at my grandparents’ house. My mom, Jacki, was pretty fragile and, although she was glad to be there with her mother and father and brothers and sister, she was just as glad when they all left and she could escape to the safety of the upstairs bedroom. We had gone up together and tucked into our beds, just single mattresses on the floor. My grandparents kept their house a sweaty 75 degrees and upstairs it was more like 80. But that night, the warmth felt good and comforting and safe. We laid there in the dark, unable to see each other in the dim light coming from the spacey lamp in the corner, and talked for what seemed like hours.
It had been a crazy few months leading up to this night, for sure. That summer she had gotten married to John, her fourth husband. Shortly after the wedding, he proved that his tendency to CONTINUE READING "Two North" – A true Christmas story | Eclectablog