Guest Post: My Mom

The other day, I wrote a letter to my mom, saying I was upset about how she didn’t come to Bug’s preschool graduation. I was upset, and I said some things that maybe I shouldn’t have. So, I thought it only fitting that I give my mother a chance to respond to my letter. May I introduce to you now, my mother.



Thank you for letting me write. I don’t mean to be a bother to anyone, so you can just skip this post if you don’t want to read it.

I want to tell you a little bit about myself. I met Lovely’s father Lucky when I was 13. We dated for five years, much of that time while he was serving in Vietnam. It was very romantic for me-- I would write him letters each week, and I would tell my friends at school of my heroic soldier boyfriend fighting for our freedom.

Lucky and I were married in 1972, not long after he returned home. I was 18. It was a huge change for me. I remember about two weeks after we got married, I was washing dishes and suddenly thought, "what in the world have I gotten myself into?"

But I stuck at it. I loved Lucky, and he loved me. We would get through this.

I gave birth to Lovely a year and a half later, and our life turned out pretty much the way I always dreamed it would. We bought a house, Lucky worked, and I stayed home and took care of Lovely. The house was clean, dinner was made, and I was the kind of wife I thought Lucky wanted.

Lucky had strayed several times before, but I don’t need to get into the details of who or how or why. I’ll just tell you about the last time.

Lovely was 18, and she was about the start college. Lucky and I decided to go away for the weekend, just the two of us. I was so excited. It had been years since we had gone away together. We weren’t doing anything extravagant, just going camping for the weekend, but I knew it was exactly what our souls needed.

I was not prepared for what Lucky told me on that trip. Much of it is a blur now, but the point was, he had been having an affair, and he was leaving me. He said he didn’t know if he loved her, he didn’t know a lot of things, but he knew one thing for certain:

He didn’t love me.

He left, and Lovely and I were on our own. But really, it was just me. Lovely was an adult, the age I was when I got married. She was staying home while she went to college, but her life was filled with boyfriends and studies and part-time jobs and best friends. She didn’t have time for the woman who stayed in bed all day, wondering what happened to her life.

I never thought he would really go through with it. Maybe we had problems, but he wasn’t going to give up everything he had, everything he had worked on for 20 years, he wasn’t going to lose all that for some fling he was having with a coworker. He was going to call it off, he was going to come back home, we were going to work it out.

I thought that all the way until the day the divorce was finalized.

And then the day that Lovely revealed her father was marrying that coworker? I guess it wasn’t a fling, after all.

I was left a 38-year-old divorcee, with no work experience and no job skills.

So when I am forced to see them together, so happy, able to give my daughter and grandchildren everything I should be able to give them, yeah, that hurts. Excuse me if I don’t want to be around to see it.

That’s my life she’s living.

The Topic:
A post your mom would write if your mom wrote posts.