The baby toddled from mobile home to mobile home, begging for a scrap of food from anybody who came to their door. Neighbors provided what they could, but they tired of the toddling grazing baby, because they themselves had little means. And, I mean little in the way of food/ housing/ clothing/ decorum/ mindset all of it. It was a hardened, baked-in depression, all seemed a normal existence to them. But, who doesn’t snap out of the dredge for a cute little baby begging for food, at least on the occasion they themselves were properly fed.
A trailer park designated for the poor, the lost souls whom life left like garbage bags, holed up in some dump on the outskirts of pristine tract homes in white suburbia, locked-up in grids and in cul-de-sacs. This Lazy Park is nothing but cheap scraps thrown together, but for them and their young, it was all they had—if they could keep it.
Mother always passed out cold on the sofa, unable to bother, nor care for the toddler. The toddlers mother was on her second husband, but he didn’t stay as long as the baby’s father did. Little Virginia was the youngest of the four children they birthed together. But, after years of trying he couldn’t keep her satisfied any longer, or meet the constant demands of Alma. She was a bottomless pit or so it was said. So he left and never came back. Things were different back then, or not.
I searched and found you on the internet. A shadowy gray and white image of you and your brother Edward. My eyes popped wide when I immediately saw the image of my mother in your face. Your body is slight and stout, actually a bit like a stout twig. The years upon years, built these decades of not knowing—not knowing if this face really existed at all. Shrouded in deep mystery and story, you emerged, surfaced like an old shipwreck lifted from sea. The sands of time washing you free. This search prophesied long ago, the stories brought me eventually to seek you out. Mother has come very far, as they say, from a neglected toddler to a wise, older, cheerful lady. This doesn’t lessen the pain she lived, nope it just shellacks itself into a happy shiny veneer that’s called survival.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by Jakub Kriz on Unsplash
