This blog is, in some sense, an ode to my badass mother whose shoes are too big for me to fill.
My mom thinks I'm a loser. I have a form of cystic fibrosis and I'm getting well when that is not supposed to be possible, but I'm dirt fucking poor and spent years homeless and I owe money.
My dad had cancer in his late sixties. He was supposed to die from it. He had lost like half his body weight by the time he was diagnosed and the surgery that was supposed to take two hours took six.
Even the doctors acknowledged my mother kept dad alive, not them, and took advice from HER on how to up their game. He lived another two decades.
She did it without piling up ANY debt even though the American medical system is known to ruin people financially on a regular basis.
She worked as a maid for many years and had the keys to the homes of a bunch of rich people. If my dad was having a good day and she felt she could leave him alone for two hours, she made ONE phone call and went and let herself into whomever's home she had decided to grace with her presence and they made damn sure they got a check to her.
I can get well with CF but can't pay my fucking bills. LOOOOOSER.
She was able to keep him alive in part because her mother died of cancer decades earlier when my mother was sixteen or seventeen. She personally took care of her own dying mother and made sure to give excuses to the doctors to avoid letting them do to dad what doctors had done to her mother.
She was convinced her mother died of radiation poisoning, not of cancer, so she had an excuse every week for why my dad couldn't make one of his radiation appointments.
This was 1950s. Communist East Germany.
A married older sister living in West Germany came home for the funeral with her infant daughter. The border patrol didn't let her take her baby back to West Germany with her.
So at the age of sixteen or seventeen, my mother arranged forged papers, claimed the baby was hers and took the baby home to its rightful mother in defiance of the entire fucked up world and all of its fucked up governments and their idiot papers. Because that's just THE RIGHT THING TO DO, BY GOD.
So my mother was an underaged illegal immigrant to West Germany and while working in a factory and getting paid under the table, she got injured and likely never saw a doctor. For the rest of her life, one foot would swell by the end of the day because of it and she routinely read in bed with her feet up until the swelling went down and she peed and then went to sleep.
She's also blind in one eye, something that happened I think when she was like twelve due to some unspecified illness. Her father made her practice tracking both eyes together in front of a mirror so she didn't develop lazy eye, so most people have no idea she's blind in one eye if she doesn't tell them.
When she's tired, it aggravates her. It interferes with her sewing. She also totalled a car once because of not seeing an oncoming vehicle while making a turn.
She still gets more done then ten of any other people most days and frankly I don't begrudge her her judgement of what a total fucking loser I am. I'm mad that I can't seem to figure out how to pay my bills. If I can "cure" CF, it shouldn't be that fucking hard to pay my fucking bills.
My mother's status as an illegal immigrant in West Germany likely contributed to the difficulties my parents faced in getting permission to marry. But fuck 'em. My parents were married more than fifty years and raised three kids and two of us are first generation college students.
My mom thinks I'm a loser. I have a form of cystic fibrosis and I'm getting well when that is not supposed to be possible, but I'm dirt fucking poor and spent years homeless and I owe money.
My dad had cancer in his late sixties. He was supposed to die from it. He had lost like half his body weight by the time he was diagnosed and the surgery that was supposed to take two hours took six.
Even the doctors acknowledged my mother kept dad alive, not them, and took advice from HER on how to up their game. He lived another two decades.
She did it without piling up ANY debt even though the American medical system is known to ruin people financially on a regular basis.
She worked as a maid for many years and had the keys to the homes of a bunch of rich people. If my dad was having a good day and she felt she could leave him alone for two hours, she made ONE phone call and went and let herself into whomever's home she had decided to grace with her presence and they made damn sure they got a check to her.
I can get well with CF but can't pay my fucking bills. LOOOOOSER.
She was able to keep him alive in part because her mother died of cancer decades earlier when my mother was sixteen or seventeen. She personally took care of her own dying mother and made sure to give excuses to the doctors to avoid letting them do to dad what doctors had done to her mother.
She was convinced her mother died of radiation poisoning, not of cancer, so she had an excuse every week for why my dad couldn't make one of his radiation appointments.
This was 1950s. Communist East Germany.
A married older sister living in West Germany came home for the funeral with her infant daughter. The border patrol didn't let her take her baby back to West Germany with her.
So at the age of sixteen or seventeen, my mother arranged forged papers, claimed the baby was hers and took the baby home to its rightful mother in defiance of the entire fucked up world and all of its fucked up governments and their idiot papers. Because that's just THE RIGHT THING TO DO, BY GOD.
So my mother was an underaged illegal immigrant to West Germany and while working in a factory and getting paid under the table, she got injured and likely never saw a doctor. For the rest of her life, one foot would swell by the end of the day because of it and she routinely read in bed with her feet up until the swelling went down and she peed and then went to sleep.
She's also blind in one eye, something that happened I think when she was like twelve due to some unspecified illness. Her father made her practice tracking both eyes together in front of a mirror so she didn't develop lazy eye, so most people have no idea she's blind in one eye if she doesn't tell them.
When she's tired, it aggravates her. It interferes with her sewing. She also totalled a car once because of not seeing an oncoming vehicle while making a turn.
She still gets more done then ten of any other people most days and frankly I don't begrudge her her judgement of what a total fucking loser I am. I'm mad that I can't seem to figure out how to pay my bills. If I can "cure" CF, it shouldn't be that fucking hard to pay my fucking bills.
My mother's status as an illegal immigrant in West Germany likely contributed to the difficulties my parents faced in getting permission to marry. But fuck 'em. My parents were married more than fifty years and raised three kids and two of us are first generation college students.