I have been working on my story trying to piece together a timeline of the events of my childhood where things made sense to me. This week I was talking to my sister about that time in our lives and she added some interesting additions. This is the first time we have ever talked about my mother's death or really anything about our past together.
It was one of her late night calls and I ask her about when mama got sick. I had always heard that she was sick for two and half years but she said three and a half years. She told me that the doctors said they caught the cancer early and removed it all. It was colon cancer in the early 70's and we believed the doctors. She had a year of good health until it came back with a vengeance a year later. She also said she was with my mother when she got that news and she shrieked. This fact is disturbing my mother never showed her emotions.
This change in my own timeline explains a lot of confusion I had about other events. I thought I was almost nine when she got sick instead of eight. Our trips in the summer and a trip to south Georgia just before her diagnoses didn't fit quite right. On that trip we all ate a ton of pecans and she got deathly sick and my Grandmother said it was because the pecans were green. Later I thought pecans gave you cancer.
It is so strange that we have never talked about this. I have tried over the years but I think she was in survival mode in her own life. Like me she compartmentalizes to survive and for the first time we are both at a point in our lives where we not just surviving. Her kids are grown and learning to survive on their own and she is accepting it. She has some time to look at the past and talk things through with me.
I am four years younger and she has mostly dismissed me as her kid sister. She was older and wiser plus didn't want to hear how I was treated by our father and ultimately banished by choice from the family. She had a rift too but decided to return so her own kids would have that extended family. I can respect that and I did try once to mend my own rift but doing this set me back years in my own recovery.
I went back for my wedding after four years thinking I was adult and could deal with the indifference they had for me. My stepmother was just as angry and vindictive as ever and my father the most passive person on the planet did nothing. Today in my sister's eyes he was a god an all knowing wise man that was pleasant and loving. I loved him too but to me standing by silently while others are mistreated makes you just as guilty as the person doing the mistreating.
My sister spent the years of my mother's sickness hiding out in books. It was how she coped with the real life tragedy she was experiencing. Because of our faith we weren't allowed to even speak of the cancer winning and I am sure she knew better than me that it would end badly for us all. One of my mother's best friends died around the same time as her diagnosis so we knew what could happen.
I was young enough to believe that God was going to heal her because Daddy told me he would. I stayed busy and out of the way as much as possible. I wasn't close with my mother because I was a "willful child"and during that time it seemed people were happier when I was not around. I learned to entertain myself and keep my mouth shut. This was and is my coping strategy today.
It is good to test the memories I have created in my mind over the years. Working on the real timeline I have noticed that a lot things happened closer together than I remembered. It has also helped me to be more compassionate towards myself and others in my story. I was 21 and very naive when I returned home for my wedding. I wanted reconciliation and a sense of family. My sister said she tried to talk me out of having a wedding there but I thought it would heal something broken.
The wedding is really the only mistake in my life and I have made plenty that I wish I could undo. I was still a girl wanting her daddy back. When I was little we did everything together and when my parents were in separate cars I rode with Daddy and my sister rode with Mama. He was wildly patient with me and didn't seem to mind my millions of questions.
Writing about my past is healing me in places that I didn't know needed healing. It is good to face it one last time and a bonus to get my sister in on it.
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