Actions and Consequences....

I got up this morning to find this in my comment box:

She had heard me and I was thankful that we had that moment before she left. My brother and sister agree that she paid the price for all of those terrible years we knew her, she paid in ways that even I think were cruel and unusual punishment.

My mother has also paid in ways that are cruel and unusual punishment.

I don't believe she has ever been loved. Her grandchildren don't contact her. She has a relationship with my brother but he sticks around mainly to pick her pocket and take advantage of her good credit rating. When my grandmother passed in 1988, the family (such as it was) fragmented completely. Everyone scattered. Most people have always kept my mother at arm's length and many just abandoned her completely.

My favorite aunt, her sister, lived near Tucson for years and when I was there, I was able to spend a lot of time with her. I remember arriving from the east coast, stopping by her house where she fed me pork chops, a baked potato with sour cream and green beans. I'll never forget that meal because it was not only delicious but it was something a mother would do. It was something my mother would not have done.

My aunt M. was an interesting person. Fiercely independent, alcoholic, smoked like the proverbial chimney and is one of those rare women of her time who had her own mind, her own opinions and she lived her own life in a quiet kind of way. She loved dogs and books. She lived in jeans and t-shirts. She worked odd jobs, everything from waitress to factory working. She was never wealthy. (Certainly not by my mother's Beverly Hills standards anyway.) Her husband died some years before and she never remarried, had no interest in men whatsoever. When we got together, we would go to thrift stores, hunting down bargains. We would talk about the news and events in our lives from the past. Sometimes we laughed and talked about nothing at all. We cooked together.

Although I didn't get to spend much time with her, I knew that is what most mother/daughter relationships were like and I was able to experience it for that short period of time. We didn't have her long enough. She died from emphysema in 1999. She was 80-something. Even with her problems and idiosynchrasies, she lived a good and fulfilling life.

My mother, on the other hand, has lived a very cold life. My father, her ex-husband, made enough money in the real estate market to keep her in the lifestyle she believed herself entitled to live. She had the trappings ~ but there is no warmth in her life. For whatever reason, she never considered that to be important. She looked down on those who had less than she did materially. I recall a friend I had as a teenager. G.. lived south of Wilshire Blvd (gasp!) and my mother dropped me off one Saturday to spend the day with her. She stood in my friend's parent's livingroom, looking all the while as though she was smelling something rotten, and said, "Oh, (Chani)! These people have nothing," and stopped just short of forbidding me to continue my friendship with G.

My friend G had a loving, caring family. All of them stuck by each other and loved one another. Living with my mother, while the environment might have been pretty, was like living in the refrigerator.

But they had "nothing".

Now my mother has "nothing".

Actions do have consequences. Our values have consequences. For my mother, unfortunately, there will be no last minute reconciliations, no mending of hearts. She will die unloved, just as she lives unloved.

And that is cruel and unusual punishment.

Peace,

~Chani