Naleighna Kai's Literary Cafe Magazine NK Literary Cafe 2018 Mother's Day Issue | Page 36

Lessons Learned This will probably be the hardest article I’ve ever written in my life. Raw, uncensored, and uncut truths about my relationship with my mom. This is not a plea for sympathy or a need for attention, but truly a chance to release all the things I’ve held inside. My mom loved dancing in her later years. Any music that would come on, she would get up and twist around like she was on the dance floor. Even though she had dementia, she always had a knack for inserting a comment at the most appropriate time. Early stages of dementia, she enjoyed chasing my uncles around and telling them she was going to bop them upside the head. In her later stages of dementia ,my boys would go to the store and buy her orange push-ups because it would calm her down. Until the last year of her life, she still remembered the words to her favorite song, I Learned How to Lean and Depend on Jesus. My mom was the oldest of eight kids, born to my young grandmother, and married to a man twenty years her senior. She helped to raise all of her siblings except my aunt, who was the youngest. What I learned about my mother during her illness was that she shouldered a lot of the responsibilities because she was the oldest. Cooking, cleaning, chores, and raising siblings made her the hard, sharp-tongued, self-reliant woman I knew. Then at eighteen, she married her first love only to be beaten by him in a drunken rage. Crying out for help and no one heard her. Until his mother told her to hit him and he’ll stop. During their next fight, my mom hit my dad upside the head with a cast iron skillet, requiring ten stitches. My paternal grandmother’s response to this was ’I said hit him, not kill him.’ Sending him to the hospital would become a changing point in their relationship. My dad stopped drinking and gave his life to Christ. They were married fifty-three years at her death. 36 | NKLC Magazine My mom was a great cook, seamstress, and a hard worker who worked three-to-four jobs most times. Those work experiences ranged from cleaning offices, houses, medical office assistant, church secretary, factory worker, caregiver, and parent. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas she baked cakes for the elderly in the church at no cost to them; others she