NaNoWriMo - pre NaNoWriMo

All stories end in death, but mine begins with it as well.  My mother and I died on the same day:  a cold day in March, the day I was born.  I was non-responsive from the moment I was delivered, and my mother, exhausted and scared from having just fought with all of her life to save the baby doctors had been scared about losing for the past month, just couldn't endure.  They managed somehow to revive me within minutes, but my mother was not so lucky.

I'm sure when my father first held me in his arms, he cried, and not the way new parents normally do.  I was all he had left of his precious young bride, all he would ever have left.  It would have made complete sense for him to hate me for stealing her life away into my own, to have resented me all my life, to never look at me with compassion or pride the way fathers should, to turn away from me entirely and leave he to wander through life alone with neither a mother nor a father to guide me.

But instead of hate, my wonderful father chose love.  He looked at me and saw the ghost of the woman he loved with all his heart and he in turn loved me for preserving her memory for as long as I should live.  I've seen the pictures of her from when she was young.  The resemblance is beyond startling.  The blonde, naturally wavy hair, the sea-foam green eyes, the subtle dimples, the not quite perfect teeth.  My father once nervously asked me if I wanted braces and I said no.  I could tell he was visibly relieved, though he didn't say a single word to indicate it.  I often tell myself he would have loved me just the same even if I didn't look like her, but I was never brave enough to test it.

There's a desire in my own heart, too, to continue to look like my mother.  Somehow I feel like carrying on her image gives me a glimpse of the connection to her that I can never truly have.  From time to time, people tell me how pretty I am, and I smile because I know it means they said the same thing to my mother.  And it's not just looks either, happily.  People who knew my mother, my father included, tell me I have her same gentle and kind spirit as well.  I feel a bit uncomfortable admitting that, but I think it honors her more than it honors me.

In as much as you can feel anything for a person you've never really met, I love my mother, and by loving her, I can't help but love myself.  Sometimes, in the dark, hidden, recesses of my mind, I do hate myself for stealing her life away, but like my father, I see how she lives on in me, and I choose to see that as beautiful instead of as terrifying and cruel.

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I learned to drive when I was 13.  Growing up on a farm, you get to learn earlier than most.  We might not have had electricity or running water, but at least we had several beat up old pick-up trucks and a law that let us drive to school at 14.  My father would take me out behind the chicken coop on Saturdays and let me drive around in the horse field, while the horses were safely tucked away in the barn where I couldn't hit them, of course.  The chickens were still mucking about in their little pen area, squacking at me with all their might as their feathers flapped about in the crisp country air.  I couldn't hear them so it didn't matter.  It never mattered what the chickens did.  Well, I guess the egg laying mattered some.  That was the main reason we had them, after all, and if they ever did stop laying, nothing short of resuming the deed would prevent them front ending up on mom's kitchen table.

But I digress.  Driving with dad was probably the most personal connection I felt to him.  We worked together in the fields and watched TV together in the house, but in that car, it was just the two of us.  No hired hands showing how they were better than me, no giggling little sisters playing with their precious dolls, and no rambunctious younger brothers running around like chickens with their heads cut off.  Just me and dad.  It was important, me learning to drive, to both of us.  For one thing, as the oldest, it would likely fall on me to teach the younger ones when it was there turn.  Dad didn't have time for everyone, but he had time for me because he had to.  I just thought it was important because it both drew me closer to my father and would give me some freedom from him as well, after I had learned.  Back in those days, I often didn't know which of those things I wanted more.