The Reason: How I Discovered a Life Worth Living (3 page)

M
y mother is an artist. She writes her own music, plays guitar, and sings. And she loves jazz music.

I was five when my little sister was born. My mother named her Jazilyn, Jazz for short. I remember fighting in the backseat with my siblings, each of us yelling for my mom to intervene with justice on our behalf. My mother
’
s response was to turn the radio to smooth jazz. She turned it up so loud none of us could hear anything else.

She played jazz in the morning as a way to get us up for school. I hated it. I hated it even worse when I would walk home from school with my friends and we could hear Kenny G
’
s saxophone blaring from the open windows of our house. This meant my mother was in the living room, in spandex, doing her own form of yoga stretches.

I couldn
’
t help but hate jazz music, since my mom loved it, and a big part of my life at that time was all about hating whatever my mom liked. Although I’m still not the biggest Kenny G fan, I’ve learned to appreciate and love certain types of jazz. I think jazz represents my family history well. It’s my mother
’
s life soundtrack. I
’
ve come to find both her and jazz music fascinating and inspiring, especially after becoming a mom myself.

Chronically Distracted

Jazz music makes a good soundtrack for a life of being chronically distracted—forgetting the past, living in the present, going with whatever you feel no matter what anyone thinks about it. Jazz is a genre of music that is distinguished because it is a constant flow of thought that has no pattern; it doesn’t follow rules, it changes with the wind in a way, and you never can tell where it will go and what it will do. Like the time my mother was waiting in line at a restaurant and a woman walked in wearing strong perfume.

My sister, sensing my mother
’
s disapproval of the scent by the way she was holding her nose and gagging, implored my mother, “Mom, please don
’
t say anything.” The woman did not correlate my mother
’
s very loud gagging with her stinky perfume, so my mother helped her understand. “Excuse me? Uh, excuse me!”

Now the lady began to notice my mother.

“Yes, you. Uh . . .” Cough, cough. “You
r perfume is making me nauseated.
”

Gagging and more
gagging.

The lady looked at my mom, amazed, and said, “Uh . . . I
’
m . . . sorry?”

My mom took this to mean, “What can I do to help your nausea?” So she told her, “Could you please go somewhere else . . . like, way over there, please?” Cough, cough, gag, gag.

Jazz music breaks all the rules on purpose. Like when the Mary Kay lady showed up at our house. During her demonstration she was bewildered almost to the point of leaving as my mom ignored her instructions and put a pretty color of eye shadow on her lips.

“That is eye shadow, ma’am.”

My mom just continued applying it.

“I know,” she said.

I liked my mom
’
s choice of eye shadow as a lipstick better than any of the legitimate choices of lipstick the Mary Kay lady offered. I thought to myself,
This is how the world gets changed. Someone says, “
This is the way it should be, no matter what
they say.”
A
nd they turn out to be right.

Jazz makes its own unpredictable, mind-blowing sense of whatever notes it decides to put together, and jazz keeps going long after you think it should have given up.

My mother is a living jazz piece. If you
’
re expecting any other more predictable genre of music out of her life, she
’
ll rub you the wrong way. But if you expect the unexpected, then maybe you can move along, laugh, cry, scream, and dance with the song of my mother.

I used to watch, fascinated, as she’d dress for work in the evening. She’d blow-dry her hair upside down and allow
gravity to work its magic on it, getting it as big as possible. Then she would take a comb and tease the roots, making it even bigger. She’d blow-dry the sides out into two wings. Big silver hoop earrings dangled from her lobes and covered her cheeks.

I watched her apply her makeup with awe. Her eye shadow faded into every color of the rainbow as it spread from the corner of her hazel eyes all the way to her temples. Her lips gleamed with a shimmering shade of fuchsia. She wore designer shirts called “Wind Blown Duck” with a studded belt hanging on her hips. Her black leggings, splattered with different shades of gray, came just above her graceful ankles. Her pearl-colored toenails hid inside her pink snakeskin patent-leather high heels. She always completed the ensemble with her pink leather jacket. I loved the way the jacket smelled, mysterious and enchanting. It was the smell of a beautiful woman. It was the smell of a woman who understood what it meant to live in the now.

People don’t know what to do with a person like my mom. How do you respond to a person who wears every ounce of her passion on her sleeve? But whenever I think about the times when things were hard, I remind myself that we struggled through together and made it together because of the artistry of my mom’s life.

I’ve come to love that about jazz music. I’ve learned to love that about my mom. We would be on our way somewhere in the car and suddenly she’d say, “Hey! I have the guitar; let’s go to the botanical gardens instead.” I love how she’d color with me and give Ken and Barbie an amazing pink, orange, red, and purple sunset on the wall behind them. I love how even if we could have afforded it, we still
would never have bought greeting cards for anyone. Instead, we always made our own with poems we wrote and pictures we drew. That is the genius of my mom—full of the jazz that paints a different world.

Better Means Less

Mom taught us the importance of kindness and compassion. Being considerate of others was her chief value. We always put ourselves last. One time I came home and my older brother
’
s bed was gone.

“Where
’
s your bed?” I asked him.

“Mom gave it to Lilly and her kids.”

“Oh.” I thought for a second and then asked, “Well, what are you gonna sleep on then?”

“A pallet, I guess. I don’t care,” he answered.

I
’
d watch my mom give away our food stamps. I’d ask, “But Mom, what about our groceries?”

“God will feed us, Lacey,” she
’
d answer, annoyed that I was questioning her about it.

She was always right. Several times she woke us in the middle of the night, before we were old enough to stay by ourselves, and piled us in the car to go help a friend who was having problems with her boyfriend, or who
se
car had broken down, or who needed a place to sleep.

“You never know when you will be in the same position. We all need help sometimes,” she would say.

And she was right. I met so many generous people throughout my childhood who opened their homes to us when we had nowhere else to go, like the large Hispanic family of at least twelve people who all lived together in a tiny apartment. At night the bedrooms and living room furniture were all full of sleeping family members. During the day the kitchen was
always filled with people cooking, cleaning, or preparing for the next meal. No matter how many people ate from the pot of beans and rice, it never seemed to go empty. When our family needed help, this family was an example of selfless generosity to us. They took us in, fed us, and gave us a space to sleep on their floor.

Another woman who loved us like we were her own family was a beautiful lady named Maureen. While my mother was going to school and working on music projects, Maureen picked us up from school and made us hot meals. When we stayed the night she made pallets in front of the TV, where we watched movies and ate popcorn. Popcorn still reminds me of the loving hospitality she showed us.

She often noticed when I seemed heartbroken, and she’d always ask me about it. This was a time when bullying at school was the most intense for me, so we talked about that a lot. She told me the story of the ugly duckling and said, “Lacey, you are so beautiful, but sometimes it’s hard for others to see past the outside, or to see potential for the future. But one day, you will be a lovely swan, and everyone will notice your beauty! But because you were once thought to be an ugly duckling, you will be able to see the beauty in others that the world thinks unlovely. And you will be the one telling them they are beautiful, the way I am telling you. I know, because I was an ugly duckling too.”

I read later on that “God places the lonely in families” (Ps. 68:6). Oftentimes I watched this play out for us when we struggled. My mother humbly accepted help whenever she felt she could trust the people offering it. There was an organization in my hometown called Mission Arlington. They would help us by giving us groceries sometimes, and make sure we had a nice Christmas. That
’
s one of the reasons why I believed in Santa for so long.

But Better Is Hard

Sometimes the only food we had left to eat was the free lunch they gave us at school. But there were mornings when our family of seven hadn’t eaten through the whole loaf of Mission Arlington bread yet (like we seemed to be able to in just one round of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches). So my mother would hand my brother and me a piece of that stale bread to eat on the way to school. Gross—I hated dry bread in the morning. I was always a little dehydrated when I woke up, and my mouth was always so dry that eating that bread by itself made me nauseated. I never wanted to eat it. I used to shove it into my mouth as quickly as I could so I could get it over with, knowing I would get in trouble if I didn
’
t eat it. Once I caught my brother folding his piece up into a tiny ball, hiding it from my mom until he walked into school, and throwing it into the trash. After I saw that, I did the same.

But even though I couldn’t stomach the dry bread as a child, I can stomach dry bread now. I don’t mean the kind you eat. I mean the kind of dry bread that comes from sacrifice. I’m so used to that taste in my mouth that life feels empty when I’m not snacking on the dry bread of sacrifice. My mom built that into my siblings and me through her crazy jazz life. Her perspective, so odd and beautiful, gave me kaleidoscope eyes—sometimes all I see are those Barbie and Ken sunsets, only translated into deep hues of thanksgiving and contentment.

I can see now how overwhelming it must have been for her children to reject the only food she had to give them. I remember a road trip where my mom had spent the last of her money on some food for us. She bought me some Vienna sausages. I hated them immediately and didn
’
t want to eat them.

“Eat them anyway,” Mom said.

I tried. Again and again I tried. Then I began to gag. Then I started to cry quietly. My brother Eric mimed for me to hold my nose and eat it. So I tried doing that. It helped me get one down. But on the next one I breathed out a little, caught the taste, and vomited all over the car, my brother, and myself.

I can clearly see my nineteen-year-old mother
’
s desperation at having the only money and food she had left to feed her child wasted. And like many parents who live stressed out over money and the situation their kids must endure, she snapped. She stopped the car and grabbed whatever she could of me—which was mostly my hair. She yanked me out of the car and gave me one of her most memorable “whoopings” right there on the side of the road.

Some lessons in life hurt. And it’s easy to hold on to the hurt. Bitterness always lurks in the lingering hurt. Being hurt growing up is real, even if it’s for a good cause. I know helping others was great, but I didn’t always understand how sacrifice worked. It hurt, and it seemed to lead to more hurt and tension. I’m not a teenage single mom with multiple children I can barely afford to feed, and yet I still have my own meltdowns as a mother. I can
’
t imagine what it would be like to have been in my mother
’
s position on that day.

God took supernatural care of our family. I didn’t understand the concept of grace until much later in my life, but as I look back now, I can see that grace is what we lived on. Worldly logic would tell you that we should have ended up lost, dead, in jail, and eternally wounded by bitterness. But there was always a mystical protective grace over us.

I believe it was the grace of God that always covered the struggles we endured. Now this thirtysomething woman looks back on that dry-mouthed little girl and smiles and cries
and sees how bitterness works, how hurt builds and stacks like bricks into a prison. But struggling through to survive doesn
’
t come with an instant joy guarantee. It comes with nothing, really.

And sometimes that
’
s what it feels like—fighting just for your family to survive. But with time, these stories have unfolded into something glorious. I believe God turned our struggles into something full and beautiful, like jazz. Our lives weaved in and out, surrounded by harmonic overtones and glimmering with the pain of my mom doing the best she knew how with what she had.