Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [48]
After that, the report cards were never posted at all. Perhaps, only later did I come to realize, Micah and Dana had had their own insecurities as well.
Despite these perceived childhood slights, I adored my mom. Then again, so did everyone who knew her, including all my friends and our dog, Brandy. At night, Brandy—all eighty pounds of her—would crawl up and lie in my mom’s lap as she sat reading in the living room.
My mom’s attitude made it hard not to like her. She was always upbeat, no matter how terrible things were, and she made light of things that most people would have found unbearable. For instance, my mom worked (as many mothers did), but she had to ride a bike to work. Whether it was pouring rain or 105 degrees, my mom would dress for work, hop on the bike, and start pedaling the four miles to the office. Her bike had a basket on the handlebars and two more behind the seat; after work, she’d ride the bike to the grocery store, load in whatever we needed, then ride home. And always—I mean always—she beamed when she walked in the door. No matter how hard the day had been, no matter how hot or wet she was, she made it seem as if she were the lucky one and that her life couldn’t get any better.
“Hey guys! It’s great to see you! I can’t tell you how much I missed you today!”
Then, she’d visit with each of us, asking about our days. And one by one, Micah, Dana, and I would fill her in as she began cooking dinner.
She was also a giggler. My mom could laugh at anything, which naturally drew people to her. She wasn’t Pollyanna, but she seemed to realize that life had both ups and downs, and it wasn’t worth the energy to get upset about the downs, since not only were they inevitable, but they’d pass as well.
My mom also seemed to know everyone’s parents, and when I’d meet someone new, this new friend would frequently mention how much their mom liked visiting with my mom. This always struck me as a mystery, because my mom had no social life. Almost all her evenings and weekends were spent at home with us, and she ate lunch alone. Nor, by the way, did my parents socialize together, or even go out on what might be considered a date. In all my years growing up, I remember my parents going out to a party together only once, and it was downright shocking to us when they casually mentioned that they were going out for the evening. I was thirteen at the time, and after they left, Micah, Dana, and I called a powwow to discuss the extraordinary turn of events. “They’re leaving us on our own? What can they be thinking? We’re just kids!” (Never mind that we were on our own every day . . . but who needs logic when you’re feeling sorry for yourself?)
How, then, did people know her? It turned out that various parents of new friends were attended to by my mom at the optometrist’s office, and struck up conversations with her. But it wasn’t simply idle talk; my mom had a way of getting people to open up to her. People told her everything—she was the veritable Ann Landers of Fair Oaks, and occasionally, when I mentioned a new friend, she’d shake her head, and say something like, “It’s fine if he comes here, but you can’t go over there. I know what goes on in that house.”
Yet, my mother was—and always will be—an enigma to me. While I knew she loved me, I couldn’t help but wonder why she wouldn’t acknowledge my successes. While we kids were the center of her life, she let us run wild in dangerous places, doing dangerous things. These inconsistencies have always puzzled me, and even now, I’m at a loss to explain them. I’ve long since given up trying to understand it, but if there was anything consistent in the way she raised us, it was in her refusal to allow any of us to indulge in self-pity of any kind. She achieved this through a maddening style of argument, in which the following three statements were repeated in various sequences:
A. It’s your life + social commentary.
B. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different