The Trophy

My mother had a trophy. It wasn’t diamond studded not even gold-plated. She got it for bowling. It suddenly dawned on me within the last 48 hours just how much that trophy meant to her. After all these years, it finally sunk in just how much I took from her when I broke it trying to use it as a weapon against my brother.

Even then, at the ripe old age of 15, I knew that what I had done was wrong. The problem with youth is not having the experiences that enable us to understand the far reaching effects that one broken item can bestow upon those we love.

My mother’s life growing up was in the midst of child molesters, alcoholics, child abusers, and a mother who apparently hated her. At the age of 6 she learned to cook on a wood-burning stove. She stood on a stool so she could reach the frying pans and cooked breakfast for herself and her younger brother. Her mother had “sick headaches” and lay on the sofa for days with a rag tied tightly around her head. After giving birth to 10 children and not having the life that she thought she deserved, migraines became a part of her existence until she found solace in the port wine bottle.

Her husband had lost his eye in an industrial accident at a time when huge settlements were unknown and companies were more likely to get people to sign away their rights while still in the hospital under the influence of anesthesia and pain killers, leaving families essentially destitute. In this particular case, the lawyer picked an inopportune time to have the ailing man sign papers and the distraught wife left the lawyer with no doubt as to what he could do with his papers. There was a small settlement which afforded them some comfort as well as medical bills paid in full. Her husband never drove after that. The loss of an eye was a deterrent to getting a driver’s license in many states.

My mother was a frail child with a strong will. She was plagued with pneumonia, bronchitis, fevers, asthma, allergies, and polio as a child. She was probably 6 or 7 when she was rushed to the hospital. The doctor thought she was dying and they sent for a Priest to perform last rites. The Priest asked her if there was anything she wanted. Her answer shocked him. “A cigarette.” Mom told me she got paid by her much older sisters to wash the poop out of the dirty diapers of her nieces and nephews. She was paid in cigarettes. She didn’t know what else to do with them, so she learned to smoke them. Her habit was hidden until that moment she thought she was dying. Mom smoked for 63 years after learning how. I still remember her having problems breathing, lighting up a cigarette and her breathing return to normal.

Back to her childhood.

Her mother would get angry and frustrated and take it out on her. Mom said her mother would knock her to the floor then kick her. To get away from the abuse, she was small enough to crawl behind the kitchen stove. She waited there until her mother was gone or calm or needed something. As soon as she was able to go to school, she learned that reading could take her far away from her situations. She read history, autobiographies, travel books, anything that would give her hope.

Her sisters, for the most part had married poorly. Child molesters and abusers were abundant within the marital beds. It was known who they were and what they did, but no one ever spoke of it. They were simply dirty old men who mothers tried vainly to keep their children away from, if they knew. Too often, it was after the traumatic event that the mother found out, if even then.

Beating kids and humiliating them was a favorite pass time of some. During one particular drunken gathering, they ran out of beer. The children, Mom being one of them, were ordered to find some with the threat of a beating hanging over them if they didn’t. Mom, not wishing to get beaten, decided that pee and beer looked enough alike that, as drunk as they were, they would never know. She and her baby brother peed in an empty beer bottle and handed it to one of the more obnoxious partiers. Taking it, he said it was warm and would probably taste like piss. He took it and went back to being obnoxious. Whether or not he drank it or someone else did, they didn’t know. They just got out of sight.

School was another nightmare. Her family was literally from the wrong side of the tracks. Their clothes were hand-me-downs. No matter how smart she was, how well she answered test questions, she was ridiculed and accused of cheating because of where she came from. If there was a way that anyone could be made to feel inadequate, trashy, undeserving, and just not even worth killing, it seemed to happen to my mother.

She married before graduating from High School, but managed to graduate in a school where no one knew her and she was able to have a little taste of what it was like to be a real, whole person. But life just never seemed to stay that way for very long.

Her first marriage ended in disaster. She lost custody of her baby girl, and was labeled a slut and a whore by her husband. It wasn’t her that was cheating. It wasn’t a fact, but a false testimony that allowed a judge in the late 1940’s to award custody to the father. She was no tramp. But she was volatile. Her temper knew no bounds. She was doing better and living better than her mother, but like her own mother, she had never learned to handle life in a sensible manner. It was easier to cast her as a whore than a lunatic. Casting her as a lunatic would mean her husband was unable to control his wife. A whore, on the other hand was out of his control and he becomes the victim.

Moving on after the divorce her second marriage was another disaster. Only this time, her husband’s mother was the problem. Marrying a man simply to prove you have something to give him that his mother is not supposed to is never a good idea. That never ends well. No one wins. Even the children suffer. A mother-in-law who acts like a scorned lover is always bad news. It will make one wish the man did have other lovers. Disturbing and distressing are way too bland a description.

But it was during this interlude that Mom learned to bowl. She bowled on a league. She was good. She liked it, had fun, wore the clothes, and when her team won, she got a trophy. She put that silly trophy on the TV where we all had to look at it. After a couple of days it went into the bookcase, behind glass doors. Long after husband number 2 and into her third marriage, the trophy maintained a place of honor whenever possible.

It was her only reminder that at least once in her long and arduous life, she had won. For that moment, she had been on top.

And I broke it.

In one moment of anger, without thinking, without any consideration for what I was doing nor what I held in my hand, I broke my mother’s spirit. I ripped away the one reminder that she had made one accomplishment in her life.

She had been a Supervisor in a bank when she was in that league. She had engraved Christmas cards, went to bank parties, and had small dinner parties at the apartment. That trophy was her reminder that at one time, she was somebody.

I am happy to say that about 6 months prior to her death, she became somebody once again. She was saved by the Grace of GOD. She became a child of GOD. And she beheaded no one to do so. That is not a requirement to become one of HIS children. She became indwelt with the HOLY SPIRIT.

Shalom! Pray for the PEACE of Jerusalem!