It's been 40 years . .

Hard to believe, really. The amount of time that has passed without her is almost as much time that she was alive. That's my mom, Lynn. She was 41 when she died. I was just 11. I didn't even really know what it meant when my father told me that morning as I was getting ready for school. He asked me if I wanted to stay home, but I couldn't imagine why I needed to. To be fair, I didn't really like school so to have an excuse to stay home and watch Scooby Doo, sure! He gave me a whoopie pie. I guess we were the cool family that had whoopie pies just chillin' in the house.

I was living with my dad, step-mother, step-sister, and step-brother at the time. I hadn't seen my mom in about a year before her passing. Not on a regular basis I guess.

It's all a distant memory now, of course. I still think of her almost every day, Especially the big ones like her birthday and deathday. I mostly wonder if she looked at me the way I look at my daughter, if we had a nighttime ritual, if she told me she loved me every day.

I don't have many good memories of her. When you are the victim of childhood trauma, our fragile little minds will do things to protect us, usually by blocking a lot of it out. I look at old photos and it seems maybe we were happy, but we weren't. She was an alcoholic. I imagine her addiction became worse when my father left.

It didn't take too long for my father to get custody of me. Even though it was the 70's and it wasn't easy for a single dad, working as a firefighter, going to paramedic school, and living in a one-bedroom apartment to get custody of his little girl but he did it! I think I was 6 at the time.

Did the fact that my mother was an alcoholic and undoubtedly had mental health issues immediately set me up for my own struggles, or was it the early childhood trauma and abuse? According to multiple sources across the web . . both. Biological factors, genetics, divorce, environment, and traumatic experiences - which could be many, and depending on the severity of the trauma, especially in childhood, well, you're likely be swim upstream for a long long time.

Surely, I don't intend to make this a bash yo mama post. Afterall, she did give birth to me, and I am pretty amazing, so . . 😉 I can't help but to believe that this beautiful woman had good intentions and might have wanted to be a great mom, but struggling with her own demons had a major hand in the cards I was dealt, leading up to where I am right now . . 40 years later.