Tattoos and Daisies

My mother's favorite flower was the daisy. My dad used to sing her that song 'I'll give you a daisy a day, dear'. It was a song about a man who continued to give his wife daisies even after she died (He laid them on her grave). It was a sweet song and my dad has a great voice.
But we don't put flowers on my mother's grave. Real flowers only last a day and mom hated plastic flowers. There aren't too many other choices.

A few years ago I got a small tattoo of a daisy, in memory of mom. I could have chosen a tattoo of a giant ashtray with a lit cigarette, but the daisy was pretty and poetic. (The ashtray would have been more honest, though). Tattoos go beyond their visual symbol - they hurt like hell!! There was something so congruent about the physical pain of my daisy tattoo and the psychic pain of living with my mother.

My mom could be mean. At times she would mock me, repeating what I said. It was always unexpected, this emotional abuse, because most of the time mom was wonderful. My sisters say she sometimes used to stare at me while we sat at the kitchen table. I don't remember this. But it's another example of her sometime bizzare and hurtful behavior. At least she was an equal-opportunity emotional abuser - she was mean to my sisters, too.

My parents used to like to tell the story of my first day of Kindergarten. I made a new friend at school and got off the bus at her house instead of coming home. My mother was frantic and was finally able to track down where I was, with the help of the school. She spanked me when we got home (she rarely spanked me). And guess what?

I wouldn't cry.

I think, in my mind, I had divorced her. I thought she wasn't a good enough mother so I wasn't swayed by her parenting. Isn't that an odd way for such a young child to think? The sad thing is I never changed the way I was with her. The sad thing is she never changed, either.

Sometimes I hated her. Sometimes I was secretely glad that she smoked so she would die a cigarette-related death. (I actually thought this is a child!!). I didn't really want her to die. I just wanted her to quit hurting me.

The emotional abuse stopped when she died, fourteen years ago. I don't miss her mocking me. I don't miss sitting with her in her kitchen, inhaling second hand smoke as she lit up cigarette after cigarette. There are other things about her that I don't miss. The daisy tattoo that I have - the pedals kind of droop down. There's a reason for that.