Werewolves, Vampires, and Orange Politicians
Mamacita says: I think life would be a lot more interesting if werewolves and vampires were real.
People who learned how to deal with them would be fine, and people who refused to learn and doubted their existence would be dead. Analogy? Make of it what you will.
My Beautiful Mother
Mamacita says: A year ago yesterday, I found my mother lying on her bathroom floor, fully conscious, but unable to get up. The evidence told me that she had fallen in her bedroom, pulling down some furniture trying to break her fall, and crawled down her hallway to the bathroom. She had lain there for most of the night.
If I had not gone over there to take her to an early lab appointment, she would have lain there several hours longer.
The ambulance took almost forty minutes to get here, and at the local hospital she seemed groggy and embarrassed but okay-ish, all things considered. Then she told me that her chest felt heavy. I knew from experience what that meant.
She was rushed by ambulance again to a nearby city hospital as the local one doesn’t do cardiac. The family started gathering and there was an aura of unreality about the whole thing. My son lives near that hospital and he spent a lot of time with her, talking about his childhood memories with her and ordering Cokes (with ice, very important) for her and helping her hold and drink them.
A year ago today, her minister visited her and they talked for about fifteen minutes. My sister and her family ran down to the cafeteria for a quick bite and I went back to her room. She looked at me, gasped a few times, and was gone. My mother, who took care of me until it was my turn to take care of her, was gone.
A full year later, I am still filling dinner plates, marking pedicure dates, thinking about giving her a call to see if she wants to go out for pizza with us, saving the breast and wing for her when we have chicken, and putting pickled beets and sweet onions in my cart, in my head. Her mail, and she still gets tons of mail, is still being forwarded, but that won’t be for much longer.
I will always miss my beautiful, wonderful mother, the best mother ever created. I am sitting in her brown leather chair and thinking about her, a year after she died. I can close my eyes and see her in this chair, “clicker ” in hand, watching “Murder She Wrote” and asking Alexa about the weather. I know it will get better as more time passes, but right now things are still pretty raw.
Your Body, Your Business
Mamacita says, and most emphatically, I might add: Your body is none of my business. Abortion was never for me, but my own body is the only body I have legit jurisdiction over. Well, unless you’re wearing those hideous super short cheeky shorts or choose to exhale poison; I can be pretty judgy about those choices. . . . but pregnancy is about as personal as a body can go, and it’s not up to me to decide one way or another for you. I don’t know your history and I’m not paying your bills.
The only advice I would give you, whatever you decide to do with your own personal self, is to get as far away from Texas as possible. People be getting more hillbilly medieval down there every day, and it’s not safe for any woman. Oh, and wear comfortable shoes. If your feet hurt, you can’t outrun the crazies.
