step on a crack...

I'm not entirely certain when the title of "Mother" began to mean something less than home to me. Was it the yearning for it in nights spent in child shelters that it became something else entirely? As one memory faded another materialized. Maybe it was the nights sleeping under bridges, or unkempt houses, days dimmed by cheap wine? The one or two nights that were blacked out altogether. The running, the showers in homeless shelters, being arrested for being a runaway ward of the state? No, it cannot be pinpointed. In those days a hatred for my mother roiled inside me. Home meant nothing, for I didn't have one, but even underneath all the bitterness and cynicism I knew that days of dazed drunkeness and nights huddled on riverbanks or in the ghetto apartments of friends wasn't any kind of life. I didn't want to have a past of numbered ochre shapes, like vomit dried after drinking too much. I didn't want the nights of gunshots in the hallway, alternating between praying a bullet wouldn't chew through paper thin walls to embrace my heart into stillness, or praying that one would. See, that was one reason I clung to Jesse insistently. Looking back, I have nearly concluded with certainty that it was almost a love of convenience, rather than one of truth. I feel dirty expressing this. I did love Jesse, wholeheartedly at some points in my life. But I was one destitute stray looking for any love to warm me. And I was a convenient hole to fuck when he couldn't find one elsewhere. I'm not IN love with Jesse now, nor have been for a very long time, but I wish him all the best. The realization that Jesse was not the author of my being was a thorn that was deep, and slowly and excruciatingly removed. But I did it. There is also the matter of the four-limbed four creatures created during the tumult. But he has stated that he doesn't see them as "his". Rather they are just mine. That's fine, I'll claim them gladly. And it's his loss. I want my kids to always see home in me, to hear it in the word. Mother is a mantle I've donned for ten years now. I've grown up with my kids, in a sense. I'm not finished, and I don't think that some parts of me ever will be. That's just fine, as well. The catalyst, the chemical change denying me from beginning a groovy dirt nap at sixteen was a phone call to my mother from a place called Patchwork. Patchwork had put up with me for about three days at the time. It was a place that helped runaway teens to save them from dying on the streets, and it was a place that promoted sobriety. So I wasn't drunk. In fact, I had helped with the grocery shopping for the place earlier in the day, and had done my laundry. So I went to the phone and called my mother. At the time she had no idea where I was. Only that I had made an exit from Davis Child Shelter, and had been MIA for several weeks. I told her that I worked in the office of the Medical Examiner, and that I thought the body of her daughter had been found, and would she please come in to try to identify? She said, "Oh my, God." The anguish in her voice was surprising. She had given me up, but maybe had not given up on me? She was crying when I told her the truth. Then she was pissed and told me she'd backhand me the next time she saw me. And she did, the next time she saw me. But ANYWAYS, mother began to mean something to me again. Not home, no, but something tinged with love. And the truth of my matter is that I tried to kill the love that I had for my mother. It didn't suffocate, regardless of all the debris I piled on top, all the storms I called down to spin it. It just stayed, and stayed, and stayed. But it was never again that lamp in the window of home. I, myself, hope never to lose that meaning.