Memoir
Enabler to Embers — My Mom’s Fiery Farewell
I watched her enable Dad for decades. It took her death to break my own cycle.
Mom dropped a revelation on me one day as we sat at her dining room table.
“When I was pregnant with you, I wanted to be a single mom,” she said. “But you know your grandmother. She would’ve had a stroke.”
She’d told me about getting married at 18. She’d worn a blue dress my grandmother picked out, and it had been a quick and simple affair because she was four months pregnant with me. I knew she’d hated how she got married, but not that she hadn’t wanted to get married at all.
Mom had been complaining about Dad’s latest moneymaking enterprise. He’d planted several acres of strawberries on their sprawling farm. As the berries ripened, he demanded they be tended. By anyone but him.
“Imagine! If I’d stayed single, I wouldn’t have to get up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday to pick berries so your dad can go schmooze at the farmers market,” Mom said. She already worked a 40-hour week in the back office of the local Walmart.
“Why can’t he pick the berries himself?” I asked.
It was a rhetorical question mostly meant to commiserate. After the initial thrill of planting…
