FAMILY MEMOIR

Lunch Box Love Notes

Helping raise my nephew was one of my greatest joys in life

This story contains a little Cajun French — old, colonial French mixed with words from all over the world, plus Native language(s) — which will be followed parenthetically by the phonetic spelling and then the translation.

A Little History

My baby sister has an off-beat sense of humor (really off-beat, and if we are using beat analogies, think free jazz). She’s also a musician and a really gifted artist, and she can be very nearly intolerable when unmedicated for a severe case of ADHD. I mean… really severe. I knew she was always kind of couillon ([COO-YON] — weird, silly, a few fries short of a Happy Meal, etc.), but I thought that affliction was a load of connerie ([COHN-E-REE] — bullshit) before I witnessed the difference in her personality on and then off medication. It is a literal world of difference. She’s actually smart, artistic, and so talented, not to mention tall and tan and beautiful and has the cutest smile...

But I digress.

She has always had low self esteem which is unfortunately so common in children with this disorder. Mounting criticisms in school and virtually everywhere else — I’m sorry for jacking with you, sœur ([SEUR] — sister) — coupled with the inability to cope neurotypically with various unusual life challenges, was the perfect storm to exacerbate a severe case of clinical depression.

2005 would usher in a tumultuous few years for our family, beginning with two major hurricanes decimating the Louisiana coastline. Daddy’s place of work closed down after being flooded irreparably during Hurricane Rita, and he had just been diagnosed with Stage 3B colon cancer. My parents suddenly found themselves trying to fight late stage cancer, repair their severely damaged home, help support my baby sister who was going to college, and still find room in their budget for the unreasonable cost of Cobra because his pre-existing condition meant that he wouldn’t find insurance anywhere else, even if he was able to work during treatment.

A very gifted cook, my mom worked her fingers to the bone while taking care of my ailing dad. I honestly don’t know how she did it all and survived. She sat in her chair one night with severe chest pains and proceeded to beat on her chest, purposely cough deeply into her abdomen, and chew baby aspirin for several hours, until the pain and tightness subsided. She knew there was simply not enough time or energy for her to take sick, and she had to take care of her family like she always has. All five of her younger siblings, on down the line to her youngest child. She’s been raising and providing for children almost the entire time she’s been alive.

Several years later during an angiogram, it was discovered that she had some scarring on her heart consistent with a cardiac event.

Warrior. There will never be another like her.

When I got the call in the Spring of 2008 that informed me Amanda was pregnant for my nephew at 21, my legs gave out underneath me. I hit my knees in the backyard and sobbed. I worried she wouldn’t finish her education and that she’d never truly find that thing that sets her soul on fire. She was so young and just starting to bloom, named the head of the Student Art Association as a freshman in college. She was close to her degree and finally truly happy.

It broke, and I mean shattered, my whole damn heart.

Amanda, now good and pregnant, and her boyfriend had a shotgun wedding in June, several months prior to Hurricane Ike. She wore a beautiful, modest wedding dress and skater shoes, absolutely radiant with young love and progesterone. I drank Cabernet Sauvignon straight from the bottle at eleven o’clock in the morning. Daddy walked her down the aisle of the church they were finally rebuilding after the last big storm, framed up around us with no walls, and four months later he was told he would not live long enough to see her first anniversary.

Hurricane Ike, after spending so much time in an unseasonably warm October Gulf of Mexico, made landfall in 2008 with a massive storm surge and displaced most of my family. Amanda’s husband worked offshore as a diving welder, so he spent long stints away from home with loads of work after the storm damaged structures off the coastline. There was so much calamity, so much to mourn for. But my parents did get to see her walk for her degree that fall, and my mom busted ass to buy her college ring.

Amanda gave birth to Adam in December, a very strong, slightly strange looking baby boy, with a head of hair so dark and thick it looked like a wig perched on his head. While they rebuilt after marsh mud and brackish flood waters devastated their house, she, her husband, and my parents tended a newborn between my childhood home and a FEMA trailer. The baby got to spend a few months getting to know his Paw Paw, and Maw Maw bathed her little pasquali ([PAH-SQUA-LEE] — dear, baby, term of endearment — probably a Native American word) in the sink.

There was a beauty in these few months that humans rarely get to witness. This kind of human fortitude and familial compassion and giving… being part of it was like being allowed to go beyond the veil and touch the throne of God.

Daddy died the following April, in the comforting embrace of his wife of nearly forty years and his daughters, to a chorus of, “We love you, Daddy. I love you, Babe. We’ll be alright, Daddy. You did good, Babe.” Love was present there. Love escorted him to the Great Beyond.

Some time later under unimaginable circumstances, Amanda filed for divorce.

My mom took her in for a few years and helped her through trade school to work in the medical field as a phlebotomist. It was soon discovered that Amanda could blind-stick anything; a crying baby on a turbulent airplane, a dehydrated old man with rolling veins in a car bouncing over potholes so deep they could change the radio station, I bet she could thread the outer skin of an over-inflated balloon. She was nominated for a professional development course that would set her up to work in children’s chemotherapy in Houston where her new husband was being transferred.

I have to say, I thought she and her second husband were great together. We honestly could not have imagined a better fit for her at the time; I used to say they were the same kind of weird. But somewhere between their painful pasts, a mounting economic crisis, and a blended family, they lost each other and started having some major issues.

They had a quick but very nasty divorce that devastated her both emotionally and financially, and she moved back home and got work supervising a pathology lab. Amanda laid her head down every night on a pillow soaked with tears that ran heavy and fast like arterial blood, while an elephant of grief sat on her chest. Months later, an undeserved firing at her job sent her into a downward spiral of mounting confusion and hopelessness. She turned to alcohol to self-medicate and cope with all the tragedy and unprocessed trauma she had been through.

Though we were all trying to rally around her, to be her leaning post, she needed the kind of help we were not equipped to give. She was drinking from the time she greeted the sun until she gave way to exhaustion at night, nearly every day. She was engaging in some seriously destructive and truly dangerous behavior as an alcoholic, and it was time for a serious “come to Jesus” talk. With our encouragement, she moved in with me, and our family got her enrolled in a 12-step rehabilitation program in Houston.

Raising Adam

I’m not technically a mother, but I try to be a decent aunt. While his mom was away in Rehab, my nephew lived with me. He got allowance for doing his chores, and my mom sent money to help with school clothes and groceries. Every morning, I was up between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. to watch Teen Titans, make breakfast, get him dressed, help him comb and style his hair, and write the note I put in his lunch box every day.

Little man hated wearing belts. He was tall for his age with mile long legs, and he had a high, ample behind that made tethers uncomfortable. One morning before I sent him out to the bus stop, he put on a royal blue polo shirt with white chino shorts. I insisted on a belt that he probably removed the minute he got off the bus.

My sister has been helping me unload my storage unit before I have major spinal surgery next month. She came upon his little lunch box from way back when we used to pack it every day. Inside was an illustrated note that reminded me that even though a nurse has never placed a grunting little angel on my chest after hours of sweating and pushing and travailing, I have been a mother. To a very special child during a very trying time. I have mothered, and it was one of the greatest joys of my entire life.

The text reads, “This is why we wear belts. I love you, sweet pea! Have a good day. See you at 4:00!” with an illustration of a little boy with an exposed cleft peeking out from the back of his pants. And I hope it made him smile.

My sister got sober and has faced a number of substantial challenges since, but with a mother and support system like ours, she always has a safe place to land. Right now she is doing well and is helping me, her big sister, deal with a burden that has been hanging heavily over my head for years.

I might not be a mother, but I can support my loved ones when they need it, whether or not they know it. I do hope one day my sweet Adam understands the subtext of my note, “I am willing to go through any manner of hardship, even a few hours of your crossness, to ensure you are well cared for. I will love you until the last bit of air leaves my lungs and my body is made ash, and then I will love you in every movement of air that swirls around your cheeks. I will watch you grow into a special young man with an old little soul and support you in ways you cannot yet imagine. My chest will swell with love for you with everything you achieve, and yes, every misstep. You have my undying love forever and ever, here, and in the hereafter. I will be here for you for as long as you need, and even when you don’t, and I will wrap you in the softness of angel wings as long as I live.”

I think I’ve realized that mothering is a state of being, not a title. In my forties now like a poem I so love by Jayne Relaford Brown, “I am becoming a deep, weathered basket,” with a little grey at the temples and a little softness around my edges. And my heart… my heart is a mother though my body could never give me that official title.

And I’ll pass lunch box love notes until I shift from this plane of existence into the next.