Leather Chairs and Charity

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She once told me that the thing that kept her going every time, was when he started to lose all his memory and essentially went crazy, someone would ask him when he married my grandma. Every single time he answered, “December 2, 1967.”, followed by a big grin like it was still his wedding day and he had just barely started his life with his one love. He then would do something crazy again like grab my cousin’s crutch right out from underneath her and try to turn the ceiling fan. My grandma gained so many Christlike attributes by helping my grandpa enjoy his final years. She could have treated the whole situation differently and made my grandpa’s life more miserable than it already was but instead she leaned on the support of God and her family to make Grandpa as happy as he could be in those trying moments.

Now that I’m older, I look at my own life. How would I react if someone I was responsible for lost their mind along with their manners? Would I have the patience to help them and be understanding? How do I act when someone who is in their right mind annoys me? How do I treat them? It almost became a self-evaluation. I didn’t treat others with respect at all. If a stranger smiled at me while walking down the street I kept me head low and pretended I didn’t see them or made a weird face at them because my 14-year-old self-thought it was “creepy” for an elderly man to smile at a teenage girl. I looked at the way I treated my family and friends. I made fun of my friends, and harshly criticized my siblings, snapped back at my dad, and didn’t even bother giving a tiny portion of my day to my mom.

When I thought about my relationship with my mom it broke my heart. I heard about all my friends saying their moms were their best friends. I wantedthat so badly but I didn’t know hot to get it. I had been the stereotypical teenage girl who talks back to her mother but I had been worse than that. I merely ignored her. Every day when I would get home from school she would ask, in her sweet and genuinely concerned voice, “how was your day today?” I would simply respond with an annoyed sigh of “it was fine.” That short exchange of eight words would be all I would say to my mom that day and the following days to come. If my mom got sick would I be willing to take care of her to the same extent my grandma took care of my grandpa? I knew I loved my mom but would I just get annoyed and put her in a nursing home and leaver her there to die?

Not knowing that answer scared me more than. My mother gave birth to me after nine long months of pregnancy. She raised me into the woman I am now and all I had been giving her was three short words each day. Once I had realized the mistake I had been making for years I immediately went to fixing it. The first day I gave my mom an actual answer concerning how my day had gone she was stunned. She didn’t know what had come over me! It was almost fun to watch her shocked reaction. She took full advantage of me opening up to her and we talked for hours that day. Since that day, it’s been about the same. I tell my mom everything that happens to me each day. We may not get to talk for hours on end anymore but I still get to cry, laugh, rant, and express my love for her when I need to. If my grandpa hadn’t passed away from cancer, and if I had been too oblivious to my grandma’s helping hand, my relationship with my mom would be worse that it was in my teens. So as odd as it sounds, I’m grateful for leather chairs and charity.