My mom finally gets it right

[villager9999]

I think the following story is a very hopeful one.  Anyone who has followed this blog realizes that , at least from my point of view, my mother was a troubled and difficult person.  For almost all her life she was unhappy about her own life, and that tended to spill out on those around her.  She never felt fulfilled or satisfied in her work, but

Comments

Congratulations, Scott - not easy to accept, but you did it.

[anonymous]

Your mother's courage lay in defying not just social 'norms', but also her sisters! and her choice was at least partly driven by end-of-life expectation. She was experiencing stomach-cancer pains long before she and Jim eloped. My father, the family MD, thought she knew what the problem was because she carefully chose not to ask him, of all people, what her symptoms suggested. And he gave no one advisories unless asked. She did chose to live to the end as fully as she could, but also told me that she and Jim McGowan would NOT have sex - that if he sometimes wanted to take $100 and visit a prostitute she was fine about that. So, who knows

Re: Congratulations, Scott - not easy to accept, but you did it.

[villager9999]

Interesting info, John, and it goes to point out how difficult it was to sort out what was real and not real when starting from my mother's take on things. For instance she told me that she and Rose were not allowed to go to your mom's wedding because they had married before she did, but then I saw a photo of her and Rose with your mom and dad at their wedding. Go figure. It is possible the "sex" question changed over time. When she made the positive comments about sex was when she and Jim were already in Seattle. Maybe they started on one plan and ended up on another, but with my mom, you could never know for sure. The issue of when she knew she had cancer is also an interesting one. She had made one of her occasional left handed suicide attempts when she locked herself in the bathroom until her appendix burst, and ended up in the hospital for quite a while because she would pull out all the drain tubes every time she came too. I was almost 15 at the time that happened, and she later... probably in my Freshman year at UA told