It was a ring with a blue diamond.
Normally in literature we are told that the color blue can symbolize things like the sky, water, or sadness. In this story it is a little bit of all this. This is a story for the parents that never get a thank you.
Towering besides my mother dressed in her pink breast cancer survivor shirt I stood with my iPhone inside a $100 Mophie phone case in my hands and gold colored COACH brand shoes on my feet. She was selling the last family heirloom she held to her name. She needed $200 for next month's cell phone bill. Two hundred dollars that included my own phone bill.
I never intended for my mother to be a mother caring for a 23-year-old woman. “You’ll always be fifteen in my mind’’ she constantly says. But in that moment, watching my 57-year-old mother,my legally disabled mother, sell the last piece of “real jewelry’’ that she owned while dressed with shoes and a phone that she also gave me, all I could feel like was not fifteen years old: I felt like I was two. Twenty one years did not go away by choice though.
In fact, my joke has always been that I am a 83-year-old woman wrongly believed to be sixty years younger. My health has sure made me that way: both physically and mentally. The glaring green eyes that could not look me in the face and say they were ok were probably worse.
Have you ever felt like you know everything about a person and yet could not get them to admit it on their own?
For my mother, a housewife with ten years of work experience forced to retire due to multiple battles with cancer, sadness would not be an emotion that would cause any worry. You would even expect someone in her situation to feel like that from time to time. In that moment I met someone who finally allowed for that time to come.
How did we both get here?
My mother was the only female in a Brady Bunch-ish family that had a strict father who although had some money to his name never allowed his children to live that way. There was no Alice before you ask. And apart from the size of her family, she was never the happy go lucky daughter you would expect a Brady to be. She could not wait to move out of the house.
Once she found a decent enough man in her life, she proposed. Once the first child came she hurried to move out of Mexico and move to the United States. She wanted her son and future children to have a better life. She knew no English, had no college degree, or plan for their new beginnings. She had faith and that was what made the big blue sky shine bright no matter what side of the world she was in.
It was the same type of mindset she instilled in me. Faith was everything. It is why often I tell her that the she is the sun that makes the sky shine in the morning and the flower that gives air to all the people around her. I try to instill the same amount of faith she has in the world into her own view of herself.
But with a heavy heart and chip on her shoulders, nothing could shake the agony of selling that blue ring. She smiled and quickly asked to walk out of the store once the transaction was done. I have known my mother twenty three years. Why had I never seen her like I was seeing her in that moment?
The sky was blue but everything around slowly wasn’t. I put on my sunglasses and quietly shed some tears in the backseat of the family vehicle. She never heard me, but it was a moment my heart heard.
And so, for all the parents that never get a thank you I am daughter here to remind you that we are always watching. We might not recognize it at the time, but with age we surely do. You are the backbone of our youth and of our future. Thank you.