If there's one thing I've learned from my mom, it's that we should seize the day, because tomorrow isn't a guarantee.

I hope she gets to see Hozier before dialysis.

My mother loves Hozier. It's almost unhealthy, the level of dedication she has to him. Stephen King once wrote a book about a number one fan, and while I don't think my mother is in any danger of hobbling the poor Irishman, I do think that if she were closer to his age she might debase herself on his tour bus.

I'm happy for her, really. It used to be that I'd call and she'd launch into some story about a friend-who-fell-away-but-resurfaced in her life. The most dramatic one was the pretty lady I remember coming over to study college classes with mom; she was good looking, but god, she was kinda mean. I was a little kid, maybe six, and that lady was such a sarcastic ass. But I sorta liked her anyway, because I was an asshole right back. Anyway, that lady popped back up in my mother's life a few years ago (whoa. Doing the math, it was actually a decade ago.) Anyway. She was always drama. Way too much.

I'm glad mom discovered Hozier.

It wasn't that long ago that she spent a week in Manhattan to catch a couple of his shows. I think it was right before pandemic lockdown, maybe. Over Thanksgiving break? Hell, I can't recall. Maybe it was last year. Time is a fuzzy thing sometimes.

Here's what I do remember. In our most recent conversation, mom mentioned several meds she's taking. I looked them up.

A few years ago, she had surgery and as a bonus she grabbed an infection that required some serious antibiotics that absolutely wrecked her kidneys. So, they're shot to hell. She has managed to make it this far without dialysis, but based on our conversation last night, it's just over the horizon.

Her mother died several decades ago, and my mom has already outlived her by five years, and I know that clock is weighing on her mind.

I started harassing mom to get her passport squared away at Christmas last year.

She reported last night that it is now in the hands of the State Department....10 months after I began my campaign to get that shit handled.

I hope it's not too late.

I'm believe he will announce more European tour dates soon, but I can't even buy her plane tickets until she has a passport ready to go.

My stepdad has kept his up to date and prepared for travel, so he'll be good when the time comes.

I need those kidneys to hold together so she'll be healthy enough to go.

I want to send her to see Hozier in Ireland before dialysis, but if I'm being honest, what I'm really saying is I hope she gets to see him in concert before she's gone.

They said "don't bite the hand that feeds you"

I gave it acid burns instead,

and bit the hand that starved me

purging flesh back onto the plate.

I won't digest your lies.

I see right through you,

to the bone,

you are not a mother,

you can barely live on your own.

And cries go unanswered

but answers to questions I never asked

are fed to me

like a diet of porous stone.

Step on the scale and weigh your worth,

I watched and followed in your footsteps,

examining nutrition labels with

more thought than you gave my words

and pinching skin as if

pulling hard enough would

rip it off your skeleton

but you only piled the weight onto

both of us and being a child,

I soaked it all in like a sponge,

a new found self-hate running

through my blood.

Resentment festers in my gut like a virus,

fills my stomach,

pours over my bottom lip.

Eroding my intestines,

uprooting the hair from my head,

as if ridding a garden of weeds.

heart rate beating slower,

bones becoming hollow,

you fed me emptiness

and I became the absence of a daughter.

My mother.

The person who raised me

on collard greens and bay leaves.

And the notion that ginger ale cures everything.

The woman who has shaped my future and is my inspiration.

My mother, Latonia Evans, is an achiever of not one but two Master's degrees.

My mother showed me that a person's disability does not define them

My mother taught me to give everything and more

My mother taught me that education is important

My mother taught me to be a mother to all

My mother taught me to be the shoulder to lean on and the helping hand to hold others up.

My mother taught me discipline, perseverance, and kindness.

She taught me it never hurts to show kindness to others, even if they are not kind to you.

She taught me that the world becomes more beautiful with each act of kindness.

She taught me, how to embrace who I am.

And I'm so glad I listened.

My mum always makes sure that I know she will love me no matter what. No matter what happens she will always support me. She checks up on me constantly, she makes sure I take my anti-depressants, gets me to therapy, and drives me to my sporting events. I am really lucky to have a mother like her, I am really lucky I ended up in a safe, loving family. So basically my mom taught me unconditional love.

We'd spend time together, me coming up to sweep the sawdust from his feet. The closest thing I had to a father figure. This old man, this 83-year-old man would be fixated on the self-built wooden table before him, sawing something, tossing the safety off like it was an option. I know it. I reminded him so often.

And then, after I swept the sawdust from the floor and he picked his feet up so as to let me do the job I had designated myself. I asked him. "Pop, what might you be doing up there anyway?"

"Well, come 'ere and listen and I'll show you."

And my plump little face with my ugly thick girls tied behind my head in that suffocatingly tight ponytail would come up beside his right, then yank to his left so I might not obstruct his arm.

"You see this?"

I stared at it, my eyes turning up to him and nodding.

"You know what this is?"

"No sir."

"This is a carpenter's square."

"A carpenter's square?"

And he nodded to me, pulling a piece of wood up to himself, the smell of sawdust hitting my nose, making it wrinkle as my brown eyes stared down at the wood he was scratching with his knife-sharpened pencil. "You find the spot you want to measure," he grumbled, my ears listening hard to his low voice, so much that I only made out a few slivers of his words. "And then you make you cut. You measure twice."

"Twice?"

"Twice."

And I sat out there with him in the heat, in the house built on the sloped hill that could have caved in at any point and taken us all with it, the sandy slope, and the smell of sawdust rubbing off his thinning skin onto my fresh skin.

And we would stand there together, me watching him silently, as he spoke and talked and showed me how he learned to be a carpenter.

Rest in Peace, Pop. I loved you in life as I loved you in death. <3

Dad taught me to be codependent.

Mom taught me that love oscillates wildly, never stable, altogether unsettled and unsettling, full of hugs and cheek-kisses and spoken, doting affections, until another storm of curse words and the lightning-striking “less thans” roll in and out and in again, striking my father, striking him less than, striking us kids, striking us less than, four-letter thunders splitting off the ceiling of our house, off our many faces we make up there in the ceiling stucco, lying here, looking up at the stucco, staring, wondering when she’ll stop. When will Best Mommy in the Whole Wide World come back?

Five minutes, ten minutes, an hour probably. Any minute now.

The only thing that’s predictable.

And then sometimes these storms in her bring the tornadoes of her checking. Checking, checking, always checking. Abandoned babies in the back seats of parked cars, in open dumpsters, in neighbor’s left-open garage doors. Oh please, guy up the street, close your damn garage door, don’t leave it open again, not at night, or she’ll get Dad out of bed again. Midnight. Drag him if she has to. Always at midnight. Dad’s got to drive her, drive her around to go check. Checking. Checking. She’s just gotta check. She saw something again. Again, all over again. She just needs to check, she just needs to check, that’s all. Can’t you guys understand? What if she really did see something? What if it really WAS a baby? Wouldn’t you want to rescue it? What if God gave her these powers, just for this reason? And these brothers of mine, all my younger brothers that aren’t really my brothers anymore—they’re really just replicas left behind by aliens over and over and over again until they’re less than, too, less than, like me, because I saw it all, I saw it when she was normal, I think, I don’t know, I’m still unsettled about it. Always will be, I suppose.

My Mother came into this world during the Great Depression. Her father died when she was six months old, by the time she was 8 she was an orphan. She was shuffled from family member to family member who let her know regularly in so many ways that they didn't want or need another mouth to feed. When her half-sister who was four years older became 16 they got a room in a boarding house.

She told me stories of making dresses and skirts out of the old fabric flour bags....she remembered tracing her foot on cardboard to cover the holes in the soles of her shoes. She had deep dark red hair, light blue eyes, fair skinned with no freckles and bore no resemblance to any of her dark haired, dark eyed half-brothers and half-sisters. Her siblings reminded her that she was the only one with a different last name. Now, a lot of people experiencing her early years might have gone a different way in life...she certainly had reason to do so. But...that wasn't her. She had such a genuine innocence to her. She never had a drink and never smoked....um which is something her children can't claim. In the late 70s and early 80s we had moments where we clearly took after our Dad.

I was the oops surprise baby...having siblings 10 1/2 and 7 years older. She was absolutely my best friend. She shared with me her love for the old movies. When I was a teenager she introduced me to "Leave Her To Heaven", "The Postman Always Rings Twice", Mildred Pierce", and any and all Bette Davis movies. She made sure I could do the "Cotton-Eyed Joe" and the Texas Two Step...She gave me the childhood she never got to have....dance lessons, cheerleading, horseback riding, but the most important thing she made sure of was that I had tons of attention, support and that I always knew that I was loved and wanted.

The lessons that I learned from her would fill a book. Her early years filled her with compassion and empathy for others. She had a gentle southern drawl. She showed me what faith meant and growing up she listened to my prayers every single night. When she said, "well, bless your heart" it was genuine. In the south it has multiple meanings - it can mean "well, aren't you an idiot" or it can be sincere and with her it was always sincere. It meant she was going to be praying for that person and that she truly felt for them. I am grateful that she showed by example how to help people in need, how to be respectful and to treat others with dignity. She had a fabulous sense of humor and loved to laugh. She always had a smile on her face and never met a stranger. I loved listening to her and her friends conversations dotted with "well, darlin'" and "girrrl". The very things I say...

When she was 67 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She fought hard and kept her positive attitude through a mastectomy, chemo and radiation. She had a little over a year clear then I noticed a couple of instances with her memory. She had an MRI which revealed brain tumors...I remember one night she and I were sitting by each other on the couch watching a tv show. She leaned over patted my hand, looked me in the eyes and said, "we have changed roles, you are the mother now." I remember just holding her. My Mother taught me everything.

Sought of deliverance, cast with imbued, Life is full of dismayed, but never lose hope, there is always way out, tomorrow is arrow, dust is in the wind, it will die. Another failure had come, doing the tasked in fat, a den of lion, received the jot of care I has.

I sat and fell core, it does not renounced the sought, so, thou it cause, to renew once mid, I say was the very first taught I received from her.

if we were still communicating

I'd tell you

about the house we bought

on the corner of Davis & Walnut

a block or two from Reed and Pearl

(small-world n'est-ce pas?!)

...and how at the meeting on Thursday

i cracked to our Superiors on South Street

who said, whatever I thought of myself,

They Recognized my Efforts...

But we are silent, and bite a dry tongue.

My mom gave me to understand,

something about the bottle, unnursed--

She didn't drink.

Or at least we never caught her.

I think it quixotic,

and as such metaphoric,

the way she collected liquid

on a shelf, and left it

for us all to puzzle

at the way, the layaway

How things are aged, without decay

in a wooden or metal barrel

(powder in the keg)

for a drunkenness

total and submersive

and achieved like a plug,

a stopper as much by sighting

as by sniffing the cork,

of an argument

many decades old.

I grew up in a matriarchal family.

My papa was on the road so much I really didn’t see him.

My father had a roving eye, and he left when I was five.

My Mother and Grandmother and GreatGrandmother were the ones who taught me that pure love is unconditional.

You can have strength and courage, but without love you cannot overcome.

To love with understanding and compassion, that’s how people show true love.

Love knows not your color, your creed, your caste or beauty.

Being loving, and showing empathy is never a weakness, and standing up for yourself is a completion of that love.

I thank my ancestors for all of these lessons.