LOOKING FOR CHANGE

LOOKING FOR CHANGE

It's interesting that we go through so many things in life, both joys and hurts and certain things stand out to us for reasons we don't know about.

Sometimes the smallest things mean the most.

I haven't had an easy life, like many people.  I have been through a lot even as a child.  I am sure that there are many memories that could have been the winner for  the "Most Painful"award, but this memory stands out for me more than any other.

My parents had divorced and my sister and I lived with my mom.  She worked a few jobs trying to make life work for us and like many single moms out there she barely made it, perhaps sometimes she didn't make it.  It almost bothered me how hard she tried which seems a bit strange but I could feel the shame of her efforts.

I was proud of her for working hard and for taking care of her kids without any outside financial help.  But I often wished that there was a way I could have let her know that it was ok.  We lived in a trailer park, wore second hand clothes and sometimes my mom would get vegetables from the grocery store that couldn't be sold anymore but were still decent enough to eat.

It was a summer day and the ice cream truck was making its rounds through the trailer park.  From inside the house you could hear the sound of the bells from the truck and the sound of a vocal collage of "mom!" that was going through the air from the kids that were playing outside.

Like all the kids, my little sister and I said the same thing.  "The ice cream truck!  The ice cream truck!"

You know that drawer in your house?  The junk drawer!  The one that has the pens with no lids, an empty roll of tape, left over batteries, a set of spare car keys to a vehicle you're not sure anyone even owns.  And at the bottom of that drawer is always the change that someone threw in there when there was nowhere else to put it.  You know that drawer?   My mom went to that drawer and started scrambling through  it looking for change for us to have ice cream.

Somehow, though I was only around 10 years old, I knew that she didn't have money for the ice cream truck. But that wasn't all I knew.  For that moment I felt her shame in a profound way.

Being the good little actress that I was, I started to say that I didn't really want an ice cream that day. I wanted to take away her shame and her sense of failure and I thought that if I didn't want the ice cream she wouldn't feel like she had to give it to me.

There's not a moment in my childhood that impacted me like that one.  It's the picture of her going through the junk drawer wishing life was different, wanting to hide from us that once again she was falling short.  She never would have let us know that she couldn't do it.  Somehow though, we knew.

"She was looking for change, looking for change, she was looking for change."