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The Sandbox Writing Challenge 2018 — Exercise 24

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What are you holding onto from the past?
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Running behind yet again! Been gone every day this week. So today I’m playing catch-up. But that’s not really the reason I’m late with this post. There were just so many “contenders” for this prompt that I had a had time deciding which was the most important. I tend to hold on a lot of things…

But the winner is actually the regret that I didn’t get to “know” my mom better. I think for a lot of us there comes a time in our lives when we develop a hunger for really knowing our parents. Whether it’s because we wonder if we are or aren’t like them and what that means for those around us, or perhaps we get interesting in finding our “roots.”

For me, I think I just wanted to understand my mom. She was a very private person. Had it not been for my aunts I would likely never have known, for example, that she had been married before and had lost a baby — while carrying a bucket of feed to the pigs…

The last trip me made home to Ohio she was with us. One of the things she wanted to do was drive around and see all the houses she had lived in. It felt almost like she was saying goodbye. I was shocked at how many there were. But whenever I’d ask her what her life was like growing up, her pat answer was that there was nothing good to talk about.

It feels like a great loss to me. Her family is all but gone now and there’s no one to whom I can address these questions. We struggled a lot through our relationship, and I’m still trying to understand why. Was I TOO much like her? Not ENOUGH like her. I guess I’ll never know. And I seem not to be able to let go of the disappointment and curiosity. It has left quite a gaping wound in my soul…