My Mom - Part 2

I am going to pick back up about the time I was in the 5th grade.

My mom decided sometime around this time to apply for a Santa Cruz County Sheriff position. Not the kind that you are on the streets but a detention officer. It wasn’t very common for women to work in the jail. They needed to have at least one woman on duty 24 hours a day because of the rules regarding female inmates. Mom got hired. This was great for her because the pay was good and she got full benefits for us. I know that that eased her worries a lot. She had told me once that if she wanted to survive without getting remarried she either was going to have to continue to work 2 jobs or she needed to get hired in a male dominated field. She chose the later.

Things were pretty calm through my Junior High years. She worked 12 hour shifts and I was finally at an age where she would leave me home by myself. By the time I was nine I was pretty much running the house, making all of my own doctor’s appointments, dealing with the bills and basically telling her what she needed to deposit to cover the expenses.

Mom has never been good with money. She really loves to gamble. There were many times that she would take off and do the Tahoe/Reno loop. Basically that was where we would leave and go to Tahoe, spend the night. The next day we would drive to Reno and spend the night and then we would go home. I remember a few times when we would be driving home and she would be in tears because she had lost all of our money. One time when we went she gave me the checkbook, ATM card, credit cards and cash. She made me promise not to give her any of it back no matter what she said. So here I am in the arcade of Harrah’s playing video games and along comes my mom begging me to just give her a little more money. It was a very strange thing. That was probably the first time that I really felt our roles had reversed and I was more the parent than her.

Our house was always the one that my girlfriends wanted to hang out at. There were many times when my mom would go to work at 7 at night and all my girlfriends would just stay at the house with me. There are 5 of us girls that met in grammar school and we are all still friends. My mom became their buddy. My mom was the mom that would take us to concerts. She was also the one that gave us the sex talk and took us in for our first female physicals. If any of us girls had a question about anything we could go to my mom and ask her. In this way she was the most awesome mom.

When I started high school we started having problems. She all of a sudden thought it might be fun to be my mom and I didn’t see why she needed to do that now. She hadn’t really done it before. So I rebelled and did what I wanted anyways. I was always getting called to the vice principal’s office for being truant. By this time I had also started smoking cigarettes and pot. My mom was working the graveyard shift 7pm – 7am. She would leave for work at 6:15 and the party at my house would start at 6:20. I remember getting on my knees and begging her to kick me out. I wanted out of her house. I thought that I could do it all on my own. She refused. She said that when I was 18 I could do what I wanted but until then I was staying. What is weird about that is that if I really had wanted to go I could have run away but I never did.

My Next post I will bring you all current with where my mother and I are now. I didn't realize how much I had to say about her. This is truly a great outlet.