Good Morning

Every day, as the day began when I was a teenager, I would say Good Morning to my family members, and one sibling always responded by saying “What’s so good about it?” This was a red flag that they needed help, but my mother was unable to see this because of her own emotional issues that haunted her her whole life.

Conditional Love

My mother constantly told me in my adult years that she had unconditional love for me "but", which is not unconditional love. The word “but” translates it to conditional love.

We Didn't Know She had More Than Two Children

My mother raised four children, three she gave birth to. In age order, from oldest to youngest, there is me, my sister, my Foster Brother, and my brother. It haunts me that a number of her closest friends who attended her funeral told me “we didn’t know she had more than two children“ because they only knew about my sister and brother.

She's Gone

My mother died on Sunday, December 19, 2021. Our relationship was very complicated. I imagined my first painting about her would be dark and possibly angry, but instead I appliquéd the back side of a piece of my colorful monoprinted construction fence fabric on the back side of an embroidery I found at her house when I emptied and sold it when she moved into assisted living.

Father Figure

My father-in-law was my father figure.

When we were children, my mother kept us from our father after he moved out when I was 6. My mother’s next husband was not a good father to us or his own birth children.

When I met the father of my then boyfriend, now my husband of many decades, I immediately grew fond of him.

I loved my father-in-law. He was brilliant and funny, he spoke dead languages, loved to cook, garden and water garden. He loved the early years of technology, knew about “The Google” before any of us did, he loved setting off fireworks on his birthday which was on Independence Day, and he loved the color green even though he was red and green colorblind.

More than a decade after he died, I learned that his mother’s mother was somehow related to my mother’s mother, which makes us cousins even though we shared less than 1% of our DNA.

33 Days Apart

My mother and her sister, who was 9 years younger, died 33 days apart from each other over the winter of 2021/2022.