Early Late Stories

I am nearly finished with a project that I only recently became aware that I was working on.
I've been learning my mother's story.

She and dad divorced almost as young as they married; Mom remarried (and later re-divorced) and moved to Evanston, Wyoming.
She spent most of her life living in the West- Montana;Utah;Wyoming- pursuing bad marriages and abusive relationships; alcoholic partners and cocaine husbands.

I didn't know her that well in life. I loved her and a peace was made before she died but I never really thought I understood her.

But I do. A little.

Mom spent entire years in near-total seclusion , a self-imposed estrangement from her children and siblings that lead me to believe that she had stopped caring, that she had abandoned us in heart as well as body.

I've been reading her letters and journals, sorting and scanning photographs that she had carried with her for as long as thirty years and it's clear that, if anything, she cared too much. Her pain caused her to withdraw into physical and emotional isolation, months spent drinking alone in remote Montana cabins or ramshackle Wyoming cottages.

Through it all, she maintained a somewhat erratic correspondence with friends of hers that I barely remember- it seems that my mother really liked to write letters, she received so many. I
I wish I had the letters that Mom sent but the ones she received have quite a bit to say; it's my choice to leave that for another time. I've heard their story and that is enough.

The few possessions she kept have their own tales.

In the X-mas photo, there's a painting, two figures on a road (a copy of a 'real' painting) that my father painted for her. It's on cardboard, a square cut from the corrugated side of a box.

The date stamp on the photo says "Jan.67", placing the setting as Christmas, 1966. I was 3 months old.

Today, ten years after Mom's death, I have finally finished sorting through her belongings. I have thrown some things away, donated others and some I will keep. My brother will get the rest.

One of the things I will keep is that painting. It's in a portfolio case of prints and pictures that she somehow managed to cling to through thirty years of drifting and drinking.

The painting reminds me that my father- whose whereabouts are currently unknown- once possessed a capacity for art, for hope and for love and that he has long since squandered those precious gifts.

It's a warning to me to never, ever take the things I care about for granted. It's too easy to lose everything if you do. Not knowing that simple truth very nearly cost me my own life, but I held on and I am not following my father's path. I hope.

The painting also tells me that although Mom told me to never forgive my father for a certain deed, that she must have forgiven him in some way or she wouldn't have kept that painting. She saw something in my father that I have never seen, but if she saw it, it was once there.

My mother is dead and my father is lost, but the painting is still here and so am I.

I've made many of the same mistakes as they, yet I'm here and they aren't. I like being here.
I can still feel the passion of art, the breathless touch of love and the driving force of hope that they must have once felt. I thought I had lost those things but I was wrong. They are with me.

I found something new in myself while I sifted mother's papers. I found forgiveness.
I can't forgive my father- there are limits to everything, and some trespasses I just cannot abide- but I can forgive her for telling me what he did and I can also forgive her for doing what she had to do.
Which was to leave her children behind.
It wasn't easy for her. She never got over it and neither did they.Until now.

Getting over it is my gift to her and to myself. So this year my Mother's Day gift is a few days early and ten years too late.

Mom, I forgive you. Can you forgive me?




Love,
Allan