August 21

This is a page I debated about for a while. Would I use her real name, her real birthday etcetera, and I decided to. This is relatively easily obtainable information, but at the same time it's private information. This is also not just my life, it's my brother's life, but here it was about the fact that it was just my life. For people who may be new to my life, my mother died when I was 18, just before graduating from high school. She died from complications from having cancer, I spoke about this a little bit in a December post, or I liked to where I spoke about it. I'm not ashamed about it, I don't want pity or condolences. I chose to address this because it's a part of my life, a big part, but not what defines me, just as how my mother's death doesn't define her.

After the jump, my favorite story about my mother.


Something that does define a part of her is my favorite story to tell about my mother. When I was in 8th grade at Langston Hughes Middle School, in Reston, Virginia, the students were responsible for cleaning the tables after they finished eating. This had been the norm when I was in elementary school and I disliked it then. In middle school I disliked it even more because I had orchestra after lunch and I didn't like touching my violin with nasty hands so throughout seventh grade I got the boys at my table t clean the tables and the floor. 8th grade there were three of us at our lunch table, a logical rotation would be you had a cleaning task two weeks in a row then one week off. I disliked cleaning for the school, the bucket of 'cleanser' water always had old food floating in it and was cold. It was seriously gross. But my biggest issue with cleaning the table and the floor was that my friends and I pretty much never dirtied the floor or table. The people who had lunch before me would get the table dirty and their supervisor wouldn't make them clean up so when we sat at this table  it was gross already. Our supervisor, the chorus teacher, told us we had to clean, I was not about to clean p after people I didn't know, probably didn't like, or clean a mess I had no part in. I told her as much and my friends followed suit.

My little rebellion went on until November when one day this woman told me three weeks in a row to clean up, which I was ticked off about. A small part of me went the racist route (I doubt it was but I didn't like the woman in the first place, so any point against her was a great point) so I looked at her and said no. (By this time in the semester my friends and I were bringing our lunches to prove we didn't mess up the table from a school bought lunch. She did not like this logic; one day I remember their being spaghetti under the table, we all had sandwiches, no way it was ours, she didn't care.) She told me she was going to write me up and nervously I told her to call my mother. I had been told that those were the three magical words to utter when I thought I was being treated unfairly. I took it to the parent level, not the teacher. She told me she was going to write me up for AIA and call my mother. I went to class late, the table was uncleaned.

That afternoon I did my usual thing of reading manga or watching televsion until my mother got home. I went to the kitchen to watch her make dinner and garnered all of my courage to ask her if she had gotten a call from school. It got cold, she was pissed, she said no then asked why. I explained the situation that had been mounting. She asked me when my lunch was and told me she'd be there the next day. I felt vindicated and went about my homework and whatever else I had to do that evening.

The following day I was nervous during lunch keeping my eye on the door for my mom to show up, she eventually did. I met her and introduced her to my lunch supervisor and stood in the center of the cafeteria listening as they spoke. It's always a little terrifying to have your parent in school during the day talking to anyone in charge of you, but this amazing. My mother was arguing with this woman who was a solid 10-15 years her junior, about following through with threats and statements of punishments. My mother was telling this woman off for not punishing me. It was great, gold, seriously. She spoke with my sub-school principal who spoke with the other teacher-adviser about getting his charges to clean up after themselves and from then until I left the middle school the table was clean at lunch and we still never had to clean the table because we never dirtied it.

This story isn't great because I 'won' it's great because my mother believed me, she believed that my friends and I were being wronged and she stood up for me. I may not have always been a shining star, but she loved and defended me. This is not a situation I could have taken care of on my own and I love that she stood up for me. She was that type of person, even if she terrified me sometimes. I want to be someone she'd be proud to call her daughter so I work at it every day.

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This was long so I'll talk about my weekend in tomorrows post. Have a good one everybody. I haven't said this in a while but thank you for reading, everyone who stops by once or weekly. You help make me feel like this is going to go somewhere, that people care. Thank you 5 people other than me apart of the facebook group, hopefully by this time next year that number will be much higher, I just have to keep working at it, and I will. Have a great week everybody.
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