I can barely see her through the gray mist, even though I am standing right next to her. It’s like we are standing in a cloud. It’s my mom, Janet, but she is a teen and she’s sad. She’s wearing a dark dress with a turtleneck, which is weird. I never saw my mom wear a dress my entire life. She was a pants or jumpsuit person. She wore a pink jumpsuit when she married my stepdad in Vegas. I’m thinking how out of character it is for her to wear a dress and then I remember how she told me that girls were not allowed to wear pants to school when she was young.
I hug her while she cries, comforting her while thinking of the many times she made me cry when I was little. Janet seems to be feeling guilty about that now, so I choose not to bring any of her episodes up. She tells me that the other kids in high school told her she was too stupid to raise a baby when they found out she was pregnant with my brother. She ended up dropping out of school, marrying my father, and having one more kid, me, nine years after my brother was born. She gave my father custody of my brother when they separated and kept me.
My chest feels much lighter than it usually does when I am near her, like I let go of my anger and sadness. I hold her close and tell her that she did what she could. She was young when she became a parent and her mother was not a good example. My mom has told me many stories about how my grandmother made her wear her dead brother’s coat to school, stole her lunch money from the kitchen table, and scrubbed her teeth with Comet cleaning powder.
I continue comforting my teen mother while she shakes and wipes her tears with her hand. I can’t help but remember that time when I was seven when I wiped my tears with my hand after forgetting I had just spread Bengay menthol cream on my mother’s back and shoulders. I must not have done a good enough job of it because she got very angry at me. I wasn’t massaging hard enough. I tried my best but my hands hurt. My best wasn’t good enough that day. A short time after this she purchased “Burt the Bunny,” a wooden rolling massager shaped like a rabbit. This made it more fun to massage my mother’s back.
I can barely see her blonde curls through the fog even though I am hugging her. She seems even shorter than her adult height of four foot eleven and she’s thin. Janet was always thick from head to toe, like I am now. “You fed me,” I tell her. “You loved me in your own way,” I add, trying to console her. I almost say, “and you never threw me across the room,” but then I remember that she told me she had done that when I was a baby. I landed on the couch and was OK, according to her. I’m not sure why she even told me. I’m not sure that I have ever been totally OK.
Even with that flying baby vision in my head, I keep hugging her. I tell her she did what she could at the time and she snapped sometimes. I tell her all mothers snap, and that I snapped with my son, Sergio, too. I never threw him, though. I think that throwing a baby is a bit beyond snapping, but I hold that in and tell her I forgive her.
I feel a firm pat on my arm and then a hand grabs that arm and shakes me. It’s my husband waking me. Apparently, the alarm went off. I’m still in a fog when I sit up, this one only mental. It’s not my first Janet dream since her death, but it’s the first time I forgave her.
