The Need to Provide

On September 7th of 2008 my mom died. A few years prior she had been diagnosed with severe diabetes and later breast cancer. She had been undergoing chemotherapy for two years and had actually been getting progressively sicker over the span of about six or seven years prior to that. When I was little, my mom was the hardest worker I knew. It seems like she jobbed hopped a lot from what I can remember. She never finished college and said that was why she was always stuck at some mediocre office job, working long hours for minimal pay. My dad has various mental and physical disorders and he was unable to work any job for longer than a few months, so my mom had to take on much of the bread winning alone. 

I feel like my mom always had this irrational need to provide with means she really didn't have. She always wanted us to have the nicest things and never wanted to hear that we couldn't afford to have what other families had. Just because my dad couldn't work and we lived in a trailer park didn't mean we had to live without. See, I also have to explain that before my mom met and married my dad, she was married to another guy whom she had my very much older brother and two sisters with. Back then, she and her ex husband had great jobs, a nice home, took nice vacations, and didn't ever have to penny pinch. I don't think my mom ever got used to going without everything she had before, so she was always trying to make up for us not having the bigger stuff by buying me lots of clothes and toys and other things I really didn't need. She liked to go out to eat and would get so angry with my dad if he ever tried to tell her that we couldn't afford something. 

She'd say, "Are YOU the one working 10 hour days to make this money? Then why shouldn't I be able to spend it on something nice for us or Karllen?! Why shouldn't I be able to go shopping or out to eat without thinking about the bill?"

My mom just wanted to badly to give me what she was able to give her other kids, and I think she felt so guilty, especially when she got sick and couldn't work anymore, that she couldn't pay for things other kids had. I didn't need really nice clothes or dance lessons or summer trips out of state, but she couldn't forgive herself or my dad for not having those options. What made it worse was that her other children, now all grown up with their own families, were far better off than we were, which really hurt her pride.

One particularly painful memory, not an easy one to talk about, is when my mom was arrested for stealing a pair of pants from a store. I was in fifth grade or so and I had been talking for weeks about these certain kind of pants that apparently every girl at school had. They were carpenter pants, the baggy ones with the different pockets on the sides. I wanted them so badly but my parents didn't have the money to take me shopping for any new clothes. One night my dad and I were waiting for my mom to come home and we got a phone call from her saying my dad needed to pick her up from the police station because she was caught stealing. She came home sobbing saying she just wanted to get me the pants. She knew how much I wanted them and she just happened to see them as she was picking something else up (it was at Walmart or Target or some other super market that it took place). She couldn't stand not being able to afford a pair of pants so she decided to take them. I felt awful, she felt worse. She had never stolen before and she just wanted to make me happy. It was such a silly thing to get arrested for which is what was so tragic about the whole ordeal. 

She was always trying to do more, never believing her time or love was enough. She was definitely not a bad person, which is why I hate sharing this story, she wasn't a criminal, she just wanted to give and have more than what was realistic for our situation.