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