My Mother In Vermont

If you’re reading this, you may or may not know my Mom.  That’s okay.  I’m going to tell you about her.

When my Mom was a junior, she went to Vermont.  I’ve forgotten details about it.  I know that she’d become a Mormon by then and that she was staying with a Mormon family.  It was far from the industrialized rust of Michigan.   Away from the complications of parents and brothers.  She was gone for almost a year.  An eon in teenage life.

It’s not even the story.  It’s the way my Mom tells it.  The excited quality of her voice.  I’ve tried to write a poem about it multiple times.  Here’s examples of lines from the poem:

It’s okay to say Vermont like that,

like a prayer-word, like a rainstorm—

And this later:

It seems odd to want my own undoing,

but many times I wished you in Vermont.

Because I wonder what life would have been like for my Mom if she hadn’t left there.  If she’d stayed.  A lot of her story, of the man who helped to create me and Candace, how young she was, and how it spun her away, is her own.  Only she can tell you of those later years.  I can't retell her story.  I can only tell you a story I imagine.

She told me how in Vermont the neighboring asylum wasn’t great with security and how the full moon drove the patients crazier.  She’d find them wandering on the lawns.  The father of her host family was a doctor there.  I imagine my mother, long haired and wild-eyed, racing out in the night, leading these nomads of the mind back to their rooms. Barefoot in the dew settling on Vermont.

To me, my Mom in Vermont is forever barefoot.

I’m sure she’ll tell you that we, her kids, are her greatest joy.  And I’m sure we are.  And like all experiences, it’s hard to say if we would trade that experience for who we are now.  The amalgamation of ourselves is a hard thing to argue against. The Lord has granted my Mom a lot of strength and foresight because of her life.  You can’t dissect that out from her.

In Vermont, she lived in a mansion.  She was the New Girl.  She was alone and full of destiny.  She could recreate herself.  She could be any version of her she wanted.  When I picture her, I don’t want her to meet my Dad.  I want her to stay. Visit her family in the summers and roadtrip far to the North.  Go to Prince Edward Island. Look out over the ocean. Know that she could swim it if she wanted to.

I’m an adult now.  I’m well adjusted despite the rollercoasters of childhood.  Our Mom pulled us through all that.  I don’t think she had a bad life or wasted it.  That’s not what I’m saying.

I’m saying that as an adult I want the most happiness for her.  As a child you only want happiness for yourself.  Now I wish I could go back and give her Vermont.  Give her the place that puts the most light in her voice.  Even if it derailed my life.  Even if I never happened.  I would want my Mom to have any existence she dreamed. Vermont ever after.