My Mother's Daughter
by Jennifer Lukenbill

"I could add a floor, and maybe seal it and nail that tin on the roof down and I really think I could live in it!  I could make you dinner every night, we could build a tunnel for me to travel back and forth...it would be perfect!"
   
As I idly listened to my mother telling my son why moving into one of our sheds would be the perfect solution for everyone (the wooden one that used to be a dairy barn; it was beautiful nestled under the cedar trees, as she had explained to me more than once), I detected a note in her voice that told me she was not actually kidding.  The throbbing behind my left eye started almost instantly, followed shortly thereafter by a strong urge to have a drink and an Almond Joy.  I had neither.  It's not that I am an evil daughter.  I'm just a little tired.  This year had been a rough one; my grandfather (father's father) had died in May after a six-month illness that I really thought he'd beat, and my world had collapsed.  He was my last grandparent, and he had gotten my son interested in baseball.  We were about to open up his baseball museum he'd worked on for years.  Now he was gone, right at the beginning of baseball season, and I sat alone at my son's games that long summer, an empty chair next to me that I continued to set up, explaining it away when people asked by saying, "Oh, somebody always needs a chair."  The rest of my dad's family couldn't believe I was taking it so hard.  "He's with grandma now," I heard over and over, or "You need to get your head right.  It was his time."  After keeping silent through many of these comments, I blew up upon entering his house and seeing my aunts boxing up and taking his things to their cars two days after his funeral.  Nobody talked to me after that, and I bottled my grief up tightly, where it had remained, save one or two quick sobs in the car, ever since. 

The truth was, I had been a tomboy growing up and naturally gravitated toward my father, who played sports year-round unless it was tax season.  My mother didn't like sports at all, and I couldn't identify with her, so instead I listened to my grandfather talk baseball when I wasn't watching my father play it.  It turned out my father couldn't identify with my mother, either, and they divorced when I was seventeen.  Now, fifteen years later, my grandfather was gone and my father...well, baseball season meant that he and my stepmother were gone every weekend, coaching my littlest sister's fast-pitch softball team, with weeknights reserved for her league games or practices.  My mother, who had moved back to our hometown a year ago, had nothing but time for me, and it was a little stifling.
   
"AL-LISON!  AL-LISSSSOOON!"  I broke out of my full-blown space-out abruptly.  I HATED the way my mother called my name in that sing-song voice.  I guess I should be thankful that she wasn't calling me "Sissy", her nickname for me that, when spoken aloud, absolutely made my teeth clench.  Turning in my seat, I looked over to where my mother sat with Fletcher, my nine-year-old son.  "What's up?"  I said abruptly.  "Oh, nothing..." my mother's voice trailed away as she turned back to Fletcher.  I HATED it when she did that, even while acknowledging that she was the master at generating insta-guilt within me.  I tried again.  "I'm sorry, I was daydreaming.  What were you going to say?"  I was all sweetness and light, but she was the most intuitive person I'd ever known.  Would my sugar-coated voice work?  She chose to let it.  "Well, I was just talking to Fletcher about what I'd need to move into that wooden shed.  I just love it.  It's so beautiful; it would be a shame to let it fall down.  With that tin roof and that old barn wood, it would be so wonderful to know that was my own little house.  We just need a new door, and if we lay a floor and patch the roof...well, maybe some insulation...” 

As she continued to think of "little" things we might need to do to make the dilapidated structure livable, I struggled to keep a balance in my mind.  The truth was, the shed was beautiful, enough so that it could be its own puzzle scene.  However, my husband was right when he said it needed to eventually be torn down.  It was already sagging, there were spaces between the walls and the floor in which you could see through to the other side, and the birds loved to call it home.  On the other hand, I was the only one of my three siblings who still lived here, and Mom loved my son nearly as much as I did.  If her only crime was wanting to be with the family she had left, who was I to continually dash her hopes? 

At last I spoke.  "I'm sure we could do that, mom.  We've always said you could live in whichever of the four sheds you wanted."  That was our little joke, made when she would worry aloud about what would happen to her in her old age.  She smiled, but I could see the faint lines of worry on her face still.  We didn't get along after the divorce, and I chose to live with my father.  My brother and sister lived with her, and our family was split from then on.  She didn't come to my wedding (which, to be fair, I had in my father's backyard, so it would have been difficult for her to concede like that), and she moved away shortly before Fletcher turned three.  He desperately missed her, and a few cancelled visits on her end hardened my heart even more as I tried to console my sobbing little boy. 

Now, seven years later, she was back, and I was prickly, at best, expecting her to bad-mouth my father or my brother as she had in the past.  When she didn't, I was suspicious and continued to rebuff her.  When she let my sister take her washer and dryer, leaving her with a naked laundry room and soiled clothing, I offered the use of my own set, silently fuming that my mother allowed such a bold move to occur when I had purchased all my own appliances at the same age.

As if she could sense what I was thinking, my mother rose and went into the laundry room to transfer loads.  If I were to be honest about it, I would have to say that my routine had improved since she had started bringing her clothes over.  She washed our things AND folded them, often making dinner to boot.  It was heaven for me, but I couldn’t let down my guard.  Plus, when it was laundry night, I felt like I needed to stick around to listen to her stressors and not run any errands or do anything else I needed to do that didn’t involve another person following me around.  She had no one to vent to, and I am definitely one to recognize the therapeutic value of venting.  As a result, I didn’t see my husband (he hid in his den, usually locking the door), which in turn stressed ME out, worrying that HE was mad…by the time she left, I wanted several drinks. 

Fletcher was my salvation.  He was wonderful to my mother, keeping her busy and distracted, telling her jokes, proposing recipe ideas for them to cook, just one thing after another.  They were really close, and I was happy that he finally had her in his life.  I hoped someday that I could be as good of a grandmother as she had been to him.  Really, I hoped that I could be a grandmother at all, because I knew any kid would be lucky to have a grandmother as rockin’ as I was.  Provided, that is, that my son lived close enough to me so that I could impart my wisdom to my grandchild.  Maybe I could live in a little house nearby, or even on the same property.
 
That’s when it hit me.  My mother was always the cool one when I was little.  She blasted the radio in her car and taught us a lot about politics and current events.  She burned incense.  She always let us invite friends over for swim parties, which would inevitably turn into slumber parties, which inevitably turned into us clearing the kitchen of everything edible.  When she grounded us, she would always forget by the next morning.  Sure, she had her faults: she was emotional, tears easily spilling out of her eyes when she heard of someone being mistreated or saw something that reminded her of something that made her sad, and that would embarrass me sometimes.  Now that I was a mother, I found myself crying over nothing more and more frequently.  My son turning ten, for example, had been a yearlong cause for tears as I celebrated little landmarks: my tenth Mother’s Day, etc.
 
The truth of it is, I realized with shock as I watched my mother carefully fold one of my towels, I AM my mother.  We were so much alike that we clashed.  Like her, I was sensitive to the point of coming off as hysterical when I got really upset.  Like her, I believed in venting, and like her, sometimes I vented so much that I came off as being hysterical.  Sometimes I wanted to tell Fletcher that his father had really made me mad, and almost did so until I remembered my mother’s own struggle in dealing with her feelings for my own father.  I was such an idiot!  We were exactly alike.  I needed to embrace it, accept it, and move onward.  Tears sprang into my eyes, uninvited, and I had to smile through them.  Of course I would cry when I didn’t want to; I had inherited it and there was no changing that now.   

Hauling myself up out of my chair, I hurried toward the laundry room to fold my own clothes, something I should have thought of before now. 

"Hey, Mom, let's fold together," I began tentatively, "and talk about that remodeling job on the shed."

Her smile was like the sun.

Jennifer Lukenbill, 31, is from southwest Missouri, where she inexplicably still resides.  After graduating from Cottey College, she was able to land a minimum wage job in a pharmacy.  Not one for change, she is now a Certified Pharmacy Technician, mainly so she can use the initials "CPhT" after her name (not that she does). 
Jennifer has been married to husband Shawn for 11 years.  They have a 10-year-old son, Hunter, an iguana, a dog and a cat.  She has a deep passion for the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs, playing "Guess My Weight" after getting off of water rides at amusement parks, and hoarding jelly packets at restaurants.
Jennifer is currently a staff writer at the Martini Lounge (www.martini-lounge.com) and a contributing writer at About my Planet (www.aboutmyplanet.com).  She wrote her first novel last year and plans to try for number two at this year's National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.com).

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