Broken, healed, renewed, perhaps?
My mother and biological father, circa 1955 My mother, born seventy-seven years ago today, was a story teller. I remember how restless I could be as I tried to sit through her telling me something. Especially as a teenager and young adult, I often thought, "Just get to the point!" She loved to weave in every detail she could remember, or rather every detail she wanted to remember. Her version of reality was usually not the same version that other people experienced. Although she only had a high school education she was very smart and spent the last years of her life learning about quantum physics. My mother was never a healthy person, she had polio as a child and rheumatic fever. She use to tell stories of being five years old and confined to bed for a year, hooked up to machines. Her grandmother was her only joy in those days, visiting her and comforting her. She never found much solace, at least not that she chose to remember, in the care and love of her pare...