Words a Mother Never Heard (Wattys2016)

Uncle Randy & Aunt Jody

Let me start by introducing you to two of the most amazing people I have ever known. Jody and I have been friends for 43 years and Randy and I have been friends for 41 years. My children have grown up thinking of them as a second set of parents and their children have grown up thinking the same of me and my ex. My ex husband is Randy's brother. We would take turns taking each others children for weekends at a time. I believe this helped all of us stay sane! Their son is close in age to my boys and their daughter was just a few years younger than Nichole so it worked out perfectly.

There is something I need to share with you that I am not proud of and will regret until the day I die, but I did it so my baby girl could be where she felt she needed to be.  When I married my current husband he was a Deputy in the neighboring county of where Nichole had been in school since kindergarten. She was a junior when we married and if my husband lived outside the county that he was a Deputy in, he would lose his job. So we had to move. This meant that Nichole would not be able to graduate with the kids she had been in school with her whole life. They would not allow us to pay to let her go to the high school she was already established in because she lived out of county.

She begged me to let her live with her Aunt and Uncle for the last two years of high school. I told her that her place was with me but she was totally devastated. Randy and Jody, being the kind of people they are, assured me it would be perfectly fine with them. After all, Nichole was already there every chance she got to hang out with her cousin Jamie anyway. After much soul searching and begging I reluctantly agreed. I felt like I was losing a piece of my soul but I wanted her to be happy.

It worked out very well. There really wasn't a huge adjustment since they loved Nichole as their own daughter, she was given the same set of rules as Jamie and became one of their immediate family. I missed her terribly and felt so guilty but she flourished with them and was able to continue attending her high school. I asked Randy and Jody to share some of their memories and the following is what they shared.

Jody says, "For me, I love to think of the girls at age 7 - 9 years old singing to Wilson Phillip's song, One More Day. They would sing into a hairbrush and do it "one more time" until they felt they did it good. Then they would start all over again, acting out the lyrics very dramatically as they sang. Dreaming of becoming singers led to a lot of "Make Overs" during the next few years. It was lots of fun preparing  the girls to become STARS!"

"One day while the girls were still in high school, we were looking for a movie to watch together. I asked the girls if they had ever seen the movie - Always with Mel Gibson, Holly Hunter and John Goodman. They said they had not seen it so I told them a little about it. It is definitely one of my favorite movies. They thought it sounded pretty corny but agreed to watch it with me. We were well into the movie when Nichole buried her head into Jamie and was laughing hysterically, or so we thought. Jamie and I soon realized that Nichole was crying hysterically over the movie and trying to hide it."

"Nichole had a great talent for remembering movies. She would hear a word or a sentence that would remind her of a scene in a movie and she could do the whole scene, word for word. That always impressed me and I miss that so much. I have never known anyone else to be able to do that."

This leads to one of Randy's favorite memories.

"One of Nichole's favorite movies was, I Married An Axe Murderer. She loved to tease Randy about our dog Riley. Riley was large and lanky and Nichole would always say his head was too big. Whenever Riley came around her Nichole would say, "Head - Move It - I'm not kidding, you look like an orange on a toothpick - It has it's own weather system - that's a huge noggin." (a line from the movie) She loved Riley but she loved to mess with her Uncle Randy even more and that would get him going every time. They would banter back and forth all the time."

"Nichole would also take every opportunity to get Randy to say the word "penny", he pronounces it "pinny". This would go on for several minutes then Randy would get Nichole to say, "eleven". She had a funny way of saying it. (She said it like alawven) We have come to realize that she must have gotten that from her Momma. Whenever any of us say "eleven" we always repeat it "Nichole's way".

"One of our favorite memories is the day Nichole graduated high school. We were both so grateful to be there and we could not have been more proud of her.  We are both so thankful that Nichole was able to express her love for us. She let us both know how much she loved and appreciated us for being her "second parents" and we absolutely thought of her as "our daughter"."

"After Nichole passed, about a month later, Randy and I were going through a very rough time. We were both hurting so much and we had a lot of anger that we really didn't know how to handle. We were picking at each other and felt very alone in our grief.

"One Saturday afternoon  we set down to talk and try to clear the air between us. I think we realized even though we had both experienced great loss in our lives, none had been as difficult as losing Nichole. She was like a daughter to us and she was so very young. We talked about how we both were feeling so angry all the time and how the anger was coming between us. We knew that we had to find a way to lean on each other because we were both hurting so much. Nichole would never want us to be fighting and pulling away from each other. We promised each other to talk about our feelings more and support each other from then on.

We decided to go for a ride and stop by the store for a few things. We ended up at a Kroger (a food store) and as we were walking up I got the most beautiful, overpowering smell of lilacs. There was a Bed and Bath store (sells perfumes and soaps) right next door. I told Randy that I had to go get some Lilac spray. You see, Nichole and I LOVE lilacs. I walked in the door and the sales lady was right there to help. I told her I wanted something in Lilac. She said, I'm sorry we don't have anything in lilac right now.

I burst into tears and ran out of the store. I met Randy at the car and told him what happened. We decided it was Nichole letting us know she was still with us and that she was glad we were now talking about the pain and grief we were both feeling."

I often talk about the guilt I have from letting her live with someone beside me, her mother. I knew she was in a home filled with love and laughter but that does little to ease the guilt I have. All those that know and love her tell me not to feel that way, that she was happy she got to be where she wanted to be. I of course stayed in contact with her but I felt ashamed that I wasn't there everyday to hear how her day went. She and I had this conversation before she died, with both of us crying she said the following: "Mama, please don't feel like that. I love you so much and I appreciate what you did for me. I know how hard it was for you. You know you're my best friend, right? " Her words echo in my mind all the time. I miss her so much and I lost two years with her that I can never get back.

Please readers don't think less of me. In order to make you understand how much her Uncle and Aunt loved her, I had to tell you how it came to be she lived with them. I hope I don't lose any readers, after all, Words A Mother Never Heard is about Nichole's journey, not mine.

A HUGE part of my guilt is because it was during her junior year that she met the young man that caused her so much pain. I often think maybe she wouldn't have had such dark thoughts if she had never met him. Maybe, just maybe if I had made her live with me she would not have settled down where she lived when she died (she had her own place) and she would not have died coming home on those winding roads. Sometimes IF is such a huge word!

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