Pixie in Paradise

It’s about that time of year, where your favorite cougar starts another trip around the sun. Before that happens – around 03:30 am, Sunday – I want to take a moment and express gratitude for the woman who made it possible, and sacrificed more than any of us will truly ever know, to bring the precocious cougar (me) into this world.

My mom and I are vastly different and approach life in wildly different ways, but I think we are both at ages where there’s an unspoken understanding and we’ve each done enough work on ourselves to really see the beauty and power in the other one. I sure do. And I’ve noticed just how loving and supportive my mom is and always has been. It has really become this beautiful story and connection between us ever since I’ve been living in Central America. Maybe it took that shake up of my life to put things into perspective, along with age – on both our parts. Whatever it is, I am completely here for it and I think she is too.

Three months ago while texting her and explaining some crazy event that happened during a daily outing in Belize she suggested I write about it. I reluctantly told her I did and I do, that I have a blog. I say “reluctantly,” because historically my language has been too colorful or harsh for her in my writing and real life, so I hadn’t told her I was chronicling this travel abroad adventure. Once she brought it up though, I confessed, and mom said she would like to read it. Turns out, she actually seems to really love my stories and Central American adventures. Even after reading the scarier tales she just calmly replies that she’s glad I’m okay and to be careful. There are no more endless queries or lectures, dragging a situation out with a million questions which was the frustrating trap I found myself in frequently (all the time) over the years. I do understand how parents can be overprotective now that I have found myself helping take care of a dear friend’s son, who I love more than anything. I mean, that protective mama bear gene races right up and down my spinal cord now, since falling in love with this child who isn’t a child anymore: 18 years old and on his own! (He’s still a kid to me and I am so overprotective – now I get it, mom).

Anyway, my mom has really handled everything in the last couple of years in a surprisingly better and different way than before. For the better, at least when it comes to our interactions, and especially stellar in these last five months. But I also realized that parents don’t have instruction manuals for how to raise their kids and unfortunately all the trauma, dysfunction or toxicity they haven’t acknowledged in themselves and started to work through, inevitably is witnessed, projected and sometimes absorbed by their children. It’s a lot, for all of us.

Over the years my mom has continued to show loving kindness and compassion to all humans and animals. I think it’s because of her that I take the time to talk to animals (and plants). Mom has always been concerned about the “grandchildren,” my adopted dogs and cats over the years. She would go so far as to not only send them holiday cards (including their birthdays), but she would send me cards from them, as if they had picked out and signed those cards! She would even tuck a dollar or five (if she had more to give at the time) into the cards, either to or from the kids. Ultimately the money was mine but the gesture was precious. That may seem like a little thing or even a tad crazy to you but to me it shows her kindness and huge heart, and that is where I get some of my heart magic from.

Today, while mom is home and very sick with some flu virus, she wanted  to make sure she sent me photos of my birthday cards, just like she did last month at Christmas. She knows it’s probably complicated and not worth the effort to try and send cards from Wisconsin to Costa Rica. This morning she sent photos of two cards: one was from her, the other from the cat! Historically, that meant the card would have a gray and white cat on the front because that’s what Pesto – my boy back home – looks like. This year it is a tabby cat, just like Mo. My mom was so concerned when I arrived back at the resort if I had seen “little Mo” yet or not. She asked two days in a row and on the second day the Mo sighting we had both been waiting for happened. I guarantee my mom actually said a prayer for Mo the night before, because she is just that sweet.
I was so hard on my mom for over two decades probably. We just had different communication styles that made it very hard to understand each other, at least for me it did. She still loved me and my brother as hard as she could, with all that she had: and I do mean, with all that she had. And now in my middle age and her golden years, we’ve gotten closer to perfecting that mother-daughter thing and I’m so grateful because there’s no such thing as too late in this situation. She seems to really enjoy keeping track of me while I’m away whether it’s reading the latest blog post or checking in to make sure I’m still somewhere out there. Mom has even gone so far as to express joy and admiration for the writings in some of the blog posts and fully supporting the story line therein. I think she even sent one of her frequent messages of encouragement after reading a post, and included some sort of Taylor Swift lyric quote! I am not a “Swiftie,” but I know mom was trying to infuse girl power into her message, which I totally felt. I believe it was something from her song, Shake it Off, meaning mom wanted me to continue being and doing me, and letting those who disagreed or didn’t support it do whatever they wanted but it doesn’t matter to us. Of course, recently she also said I’d better stay safe down here because she hadn’t had to body slam anyone in a while. So maybe I not only get a lot of my heart strength from her but a little bit of the feistiness too! She’s a small woman, under five feet tall and very soft spoken and in no way violent. The image of her body slamming anyone is like that sweet little police officer from Police Academy, trying to explain why she is in line for training. It’s the image I always have of my mom, but I do believe if I needed her here, she’d face her crippling fear of heights and flying, talk someone to death in the seat next to her, just to try and find me, accidentally making friends all along the way and becoming the newest narcos kingpin. She’s a little naive and would think she was the head of a plantain farm but once she’s got the reputation, no one would tell her otherwise. Am I right?