I owe everything practical that I know to the fact that my mom homeschooled me. She taught me to read before my sixth birthday. She taught me more French than I'd ever need. She taught me about plants, water, and the earth in Whayas yard. She taught me how to see that everything was alive, living in a cycle together that made the world keep breathing. She taught me about stars and space and gravity. She taught me math, and how to count money, and how to survive when there's hardly enough. She taught me about food, nourishment and respect. We ate vegetarian, partially because meat was expensive and partially because my mom watched me cry when I found a dead bird in Whayas garden. She taught me how to cook. From a young age, connectivity with the natural world just dominated everything, including dinner.
She also took me to college classes with her. Even in the absence of Daniel, she was not a quitter. She maintained her education on a part time basis, sometimes only taking one class at a time. I'm sure there were rules against it, and maybe she intentionally chose classes that would allow for my presence to go unquestioned, but I knew how to stay quiet and so I sat next to her desk on the floor and most people ignored me. She also took classes online at home on a computer she'd rented from the library. We took those together as well. I was learning quite a lot about Environmental activism, which was her newest chosen area of study. Florence just loved nature almost as much as she loved me. She also loved being loud.
She truly just really liked activism on its own. Turning 10 seemed to mean that I was quite old enough to partake in such things. 2008 was a difficult time on the economy in the US, with a major financial crash that had people taking to the street. Florence agreed with the major qualms, and so my mom and I marched through the streets alongside another few thousand disgruntled people in the city. We had a lot of fun doing that. I considered it part of my homeschooling; learning to fight the powers that be. She was just teaching me to pay attention. She was showing me that it was alright to demand things sometimes. She taught me about capitalism and corruption and about the fact that you definitely couldn't trust governments to do the right thing all the time.
Regardless, the recession of 2008 still closed the club I'd grown up in. That meant that after a decade of bartending, my mother no longer had a job.
This time wasn't the same as before. She was somewhat educated. She wasn't a teenager anymore and she had a meager savings account and child that could technically stay home alone if she was in a pinch. She started applying for jobs and eventually was hired on as an office lady in an environmental protections agency. She brought home documents for us to read together and homeschool began taking shape in the afternoons. Notably, her college career was put on hold due to the schedule change and I suddenly spent more time at Whayas than I did before. That was fine by me too because Whaya couldn't hear me reading out loud to myself, and she always wanted her garden weeded. She made me tea and taught me to plant seeds.
Daniel was still popping in an out of the picture but it became clear after that initial Christmas tiff that he didn't really live with us anymore. He was more for visiting than he was staying. He was present, but not permanent. I only asked about it one time, and my mom told me that everyone had to live life in the way that was best for them. She told me we couldn't be trying to change that, and I accepted that she was maybe right, because she always was.
My grandfather wasn't exactly a constant figure, but he was around a little bit now too. Even though he'd been hostile and insulting, Christmas hadn't gone too terribly. I didn't like him, but I liked that my mom seemed to feel some level of connection in his home for the holiday and for that, I chose to tolerate him. We could be civil. I just needed to ignore most of the things he said when he spoke.
I was only 5 when he brazenly informed us that I was a boy that looked like a girl. You should know that it was maybe the first time gender had ever been a topic of discussion for me. I was aware that I was what would be considered a boy. I don't want you to think that my mom did something to prevent me from knowing that. As far as having some sort of baseline understanding of gender, I did know that I was her son. I was referred to as such by her plenty, but in the same way that my mother had decidedly called me Darling for my entire life, things like gender and names were not a cage for me. Maybe it's because I'd never had a consistent male figure aside from Daniel (who was not technically consistent). Maybe she just knew something about me that I wouldn't figure out for a while, but boyhood wasn't exactly a constraint I ever felt.
When my grandfather Benjamin said that to me, I was patient enough to wait until I got home before inquiring.
I asked her, "Why did he say I looked like a girl?"
I wasn't offended. My mother hadn't ever allowed me to believe that being called a girl was an insult. I simply wanted to know.
"Because he... my dads the type of person who believes things ought to look a certain way," she explained to me. "And we just don't live like that."
"Is he the only one that believes that?" I replied.
"No," she said. "No, he isn't the only one."
"Do you think I look like a girl?" I asked.
She'd looked at me the way she always looked at me, with love and adoration for everything that made me hers.
"I think you look like my Darling," she said informed me with all the warmth in the world. "And I don't need you to be anything else."
So from there forward we saw her father periodically and he sometimes made comments about me, the way she let me dress and the way I wore my hair and even the color of my complexion, and she never let him make me feel any sort of way about it. She just said, "I love Darling just the way he is."
It was easy to ignore comments from a bitter old man when she was standing right there giving me a look of absolute non concern about it. My mother was my best friend. I didn't know many people my own age, but I had her. She and I had a language that was completely non verbal between the two of us. We shared knowing looks and had conversations without ever saying a word.
It was as if she were saying, get a load of this old guy. He's totally out of touch.
And I was looking back and saying, he just doesn't get it, does he?
In that way, Grandfather Benjamin wasn't doing any harm. It was clear that he still cared for my mom, even if I was a clear lapse of judgment in his eyes. All you had to do was consider the fact that he stayed there in Portland instead of enacting his plans of moving back to Europe. He had no reason to stay, except for her. He received her letters and stewed in disappointment for 5 years without speaking to her, but he still wouldn't leave.
He spent lots of time trying to convince her that they would move too. As soon as the three of us would gather, he'd talk about going back again. As if no time had passed at all. He was pleased that she'd gone to school too, even though he found her subject innately idiotic (He thought the fact that I was homeschooled was idiotic as well, but that was a whole other discussion). He really believed there was hope for them.
So that was our life. I was a wild and free homeschool student. My father was cordial, but essentially absent. My mom was my best friend and possibly the most beautiful and inspiring person I'd ever know. I was voraciously in love with our tiny little apartment and our gleefully happy life together.
Then one year after she started her job with the environmental agency, she found a lump on her breast.
The both of us had finally gotten health insurance that year. I was 11. Until then I'd been getting my shots at a free pop up clinic and she'd simply gone without care. We'd both had our check ups together earlier that year, so the lump was an obvious surprise. It had come out of nowhere. Considering how her mother had passed, something I was already aware of at that point, the lump was a huge concern.
She scheduled an appointment immediately. I went with her to the woman's clinic and received odd looks from women in the waiting room for being the only male presenting person there. My mom told me that there was nothing to worry about with a look on her face that spoke to me in our unspoken language, calling her a liar.
I'll spare you most of the details. You don't need to know the agonizing waiting or the fact that I slept in her bed for several days while we anticipated results even though I'd had my own bed crammed up next to hers in the studio for a few years already. It was a scary time, so I'll just come out with it.
First it was a mammogram with bad news. Then it was a biopsy. Then it was an oncologist. Then it was more and more tests before they determined that she had aggressive breast cancer, just like her mother had carried before her. Sometimes things like that were just hereditary.
Cancer spreads like the plague, jumping from cell to cell and seeping into places it doesn't belong like sticky unstoppable syrups. It was no different in her body. Once we received bad news, it was a trail of more and more until we were both drowning in it.
I don't want to talk about how she suffered. Healthcare is a privilege in our country. Even with her new and better job and even with our insurance, nothing was ever truly affordable. We'd lived in the tiniest apartment in the city. We'd shared a bedroom. We'd eaten like vegetarians to avoid meat prices and we'd never gone out to eat with the exception of my birthdays. We'd walked everywhere instead of owning a car. We did everything we could to manage living on a single persons salary, and it still didn't matter. Healthcare cost everything we had and more. Eventually she was too sick to even go to work. Eventually Daniel stopped coming by because he didn't want to see her ill. Eventually, she stopped being able to smile like she meant it.
Things fell apart so quickly, that nobody would have ever seen it coming. Even so, she tried to prepare me. She spent more time than ever talking with me, even on a hoarse voice that struggled not to waver. She told me everything she thought I'd ever need to know. She said copious I love yous. She begged me to be everything I wanted to be and nothing I was meant to be without passion. She reminded me that her father was a foolish old man who'd try to crush me. She urged me to remember Daniel was a mess, but not a total tool. She dispensed wisdom like her days were numbered, before I'd realized they truly were. My mother did a lifetime of homeschool to me from a chair in a hospital room. She wanted me to walk into life accepting nothing less than I deserved and learning more than could ever be my fair share.
She never lived vicariously through me. That's something I'll always notice. My mom breathed life into me so intentionally, that the power to drive it was never lying with anyone but myself.
Florence died in the summer of 2012. She was barely past 30 years old. I was 14. I'm certain that half the stars went black that night, because I'd never thought the sky was ever so dark. It was like light had been sucked out of the world with her.
I was well acquainted with hospitals at that point, so I just sat there and waited when it was all over. I let the emptiness paralyze me in my chest. I waited for what would happen to me next with almost apathetic thoughts in my head. It was like she'd pulled my ability to care right out of me in the direct moments following her departure. I think I expected Daniel, but I was unpleasantly surprised when it was my Grandfather Benjamin that walked in with the social worker to collect me.
Nobody bothers to tell details like this to little teenagers, but I'll explain the semantics to you as I've come to understand them.
Daniel wanted me. He and I had our differences and we weren't close by any means, but he was there in the city the day my mother died. She'd called him the night before. She told him she could hear the music in New Orleans again, and that she thought she'd be there soon. She told him that I'd be here waiting for him when she was gone. She asked him to figure out how to be a dad sooner rather than later.
So Daniel came and that's when he ran into my grandfather at the hospital. They had definitely met at this point. In passing at the very least, my mother had eventually forced us all into a room together. It had lasted long enough for Daniel and my grandfather to have a rocky relationship to say the least.
My grandfather laid it out for him in facts, the way he'd done when informing me of my gender. He told Daniel that he'd missed my birth, something we were all aware of. He told him that my birth certificate didn't name any fathers. He asked him how he supposed he had any claim to the child upstairs holding a corpses hand.
Daniel asserted he was still my father.
Grandfather Benjamin asked him to prove it. He told my father that he had a lawyer. He told him he had money. He told him that he dared him to fight.
Daniel was a gambler. He was poor. He had a criminal record. He had more fear in his heart than most people, which truly was why he'd stayed away in the first place.
Daniel conceded. He went home.
My grandfather showed up at the hospital with a social worker, and then he took me with him.
There was a day of silence. It wouldn't take me long to realize that Grandfather Benjamin took most things in silence. I don't remember ever thinking he looked upset, but Grandfather Benjamin's grief just didn't look a way that I could recognize. Silence and stillness were the flags of his sadness. It was just different than I was used to. His daughter had been full of open and viewable emotion. Thats what I'd been taught to have.
I guess I was quite frozen too. Inside myself I felt the unending urge to sob, and technically I did cry to myself in the guest room I'd been given, but outwardly in the presence of such a stoic man, I felt myself still as well. It was hard to do much else. There wasn't going to be any conversation making. Words couldn't encompass any of it anyways. The words would have been rendered pointless.
Half of my self had been taken from me. My mother had been the most solid and consistent person in my entire life. She was my everything. She was an extension of myself. She was the person I had craved most in the world from birth until present.
In the silence, arrangements were made. My grandfather had her body cremated. He placed her ashes in a plain undecorated box that lived on his mantle, and he told me to keep my "grubby brown hands" off of it. He cleaned out her apartment and put all her things in bags which he then shoved in a closet in the hallway. He told me not to touch those either. It was all very quick, and then all mentions of my mother ceased.
Summer came to a close. Benjamin informed me that I'd be enrolling in a Christian private school for boys in the city. I said okay, because arguing did not seem conductive to the peace and quiet in which I was being given to cry at night. I couldn't help but feel as though the experiences my mother had told me about in her youth were being repeated like a written play through me. I was just the new main actor in a repeating story.
The day before school was when I realized how bad things were truly going to get.
"Boy!" My Grandfather Benjamin called, which was the name he'd taken to referencing me. "Get in here!"
I was in my room, but I raised myself and blinked my eyes clear before trudging out to the kitchen where he stood at the ornate table. He'd pulled a chair out for me. I stood a few feet away in question still.
"Sit down, Boy!" He ordered.
So I sat. He informed me that he was getting me ready for school. I knew what was happening as he stood behind me. It was even clearer when I heard the buzz. I let myself stay frozen, in complete contrast to everything my mom had ever taught me about fighting. The wisdom she'd given me to be powerful; the art of protecting my true self... it all felt too far away. The bravery needed had seemingly went dark just like the stars did.
I watched long dark curls fall to the ground as Grandfather Benjamin shaved my head, and I didn't say a word.