My Mother's Box of Regrets

My Mother’s Box of Regrets

I stepped out of the house and onto our wrap around porch on a frigid January afternoon. The farm was quiet; the horses had already been put up for the night, the dogs were lounging inside by the fire, and there was no one to be found. I knew someone had to be home, seeing as how all three of the family cars were still parked in the driveway. None of the cars had been driven in a while, as was evident by the ice forming on their windshields like opaque frosting, reminding me of the impending winter storm. “Mom? Are you out here?” I tried again. I heard a quiet shuffle at the tree line and shifted my glance quickly. A chestnut colored hand reached out from behind a tall pine tree and flicked something to the ground. The glint of my mom’s gold and opal ring caught my eye, and I ran over to see her. What I saw didn’t look like my mother at all.

My mom was born into a small family in Pennsylvania on Friday, April thirteenth. Her mother was a fair, quiet woman, and extremely secretive about her life in Poland before she immigrated to the United States. My grandpa was the opposite; his dark skin was evidence of his deep roots in Oklahoma’s Choctaw Nation. Generally unhappy, and money crazed, my grandpa was far from an affectionate father figure. As the middle child, my mom was used to not receiving a significant amount of attention.

The family moved around periodically to suit the needs of my grandpa’s demanding job as a rocket scientist, which left my mother caught in an unpredictable nomadic lifestyle. They spent time in New Jersey, California, Missouri, and Colorado. By the time my mom turned eighteen, she was tired of the dysfunctional family and dropped out of high school. Her parents got divorced, and she moved out to make a life for herself.

My mom is the definition of a pioneer. Straight out of high school with nothing but her GED, she found her way to a small town in California and began working. She bounced around from town to town, slowly making her way back to the east coast as the years went by. After one brutal winter in Buffalo, New York, my mom sought a warmer lifestyle in North Carolina.

Once there, she made the decision to go to college to earn a degree in Environmental Engineering from North Carolina State University. Before then, temporary jobs had been all she had ever known, but North Carolina started to feel like home. She made friends for the first time in her life, and these friendships were not fleeting like a short winter day; they were real and they were significant. She bought a land plot and built her first home with little outside help, and found a job working for a large company.

On the day she met my father, my mom had casually entered her boss’s office to drop off a proposal. Instead of her small, rugged boss, she came face to face with a massive ex college quarterback. He smiled charmingly, flashed his ivory teeth, tucked his blonde hair under a ball cap, and that’s when my mom knew. They got married soon after on a tepid October afternoon. Fast forward a happily ever after later and my parents were settled on a small farm in Granville county, North Carolina with two daughters, and too many animals to count.

Even after marrying the love of her life, my mom had trouble escaping her family’s insanity. At the age of thirteen, it was difficult to conceive how my mom stayed sane through all of it; her mother passed away in December, her sister disowned her, and her father had attempted to ruin her marriage. Things had become unstable for her once again, and all within the span of a year. So that’s why I wasn’t surprised when I walked to the tree line and found my mom sitting on the cold ground that January afternoon.

My mother’s oak brown eyes were adorned with dew drops and her dark Native American hair was tangled and smelled vaguely of beer. The cigarette in her hand, the same thing that had killed her mother one-month prior, was burning hot with regret and despair. The crow’s feet around my mother’s eyes deepened as she smiled at me with pity. She placed the cigarette back into her mouth silently, took a long drag, and handed me the box of Marlboro lights. I nodded and gave her hand a gentle squeeze before walking off to bury her box of regrets in the dying azalea garden.