Libby Simpson

The Southern drawl is a proud staple of the Bluegrass State of Kentucky. Those who are lucky enough grow out of it when they move far away from the tumbleweeds and buggies to suburban neighborhoods. Where the classic Tecovas are traded in for a pair of nice, clean Converse. Where grasses are mowed daily instead of monthly. Where the double-wide with a communal dumpster in the back is traded in for a beautiful brick home with a Homeowners Association. When the time is finally right, they venture back into history. They travel home to the house built for them with a tire swing and gravel pathway leading up to the front porch. The southern drawl and shortened vowels come flooding back.

 Some people grow to regret their roots, calling out the illiteracy of the Southern knowledge. When flipping through a photo album or kids calling out “Mama” instead of “Mom” they suddenly feel an uncomfortable wave of emotion, becoming irritable and unable to stay still. It becomes a trigger when memories of their childhood are flashed in front of them, so they decide to put their past behind them and only move forward because it is just that easy. For many, the religious holidays become the worst because they are ingrained into the Southern principles of life and liberty. Christmas becomes a time to waste money on cheap decorations with the worst color combinations imaginable and purchase gifts for those you say you care most about, regardless of whether you do or not. Crowds are to be avoided at all costs. Families only reflect the good times in what could have been if the Southern principles stuck with you as they did with everyone else. The Christmas Eve church service is a must. It is the one time of the year the whole family is together, and they must show off the beautiful patriarch they molded. 

In some far-off land, like a distant planet in a new solar system or a high-security compound surrounded by a moat and forest as far as the eye can see, there is a place where the women knew exactly who they were and that they were beautiful.

My mother was no taller than 5 '5 and for the first 40 years of her life, she was beautiful. Her hair fell just below her shoulders. Her hair was a terrible box-dye blonde that eventually faded to a bronze-yellow color. She always made sure to dress comfortably and she was never afraid to justify her fashion choices. She was no typical southern matriarch, which was arguably her most noticeable feature. She defied every rule of womanhood and motherhood. 

She was a loud woman with even louder opinions. She told stories of growing up on the farm with her mother, father and four sisters. The tobacco fields molded her. She was the youngest of five. Her parents had made one last effort for a son. Instead, they got her. She was often referred to as a “tomboy”, which was good for her father, although he loved her just the same as the rest of her sisters. She enjoyed the dirt and outdoors and she was never afraid of good competition. She was headstrong and irritable at times.

From oldest to youngest, there were 18 years between my mother and her oldest sister and there was six years between each sister being born. Sandra Sue, or Sandy, was the oldest. She thrived at everything and by the time she was 19, she had married a military man and left home. The twins, Shelley Drew and Sherry Lou had each other. Photo albums were always filled with their matching outfits and the messes they would make as small children. Clara Ruth was the fourth sister, and then eventually my mother, Amy Jo came along. 

In her early days, my mother was a strong woman. In every picture from her twenties, she was overdressed and dressed up in the newest trending clothes, which consisted of mostly bright neon tracksuits since it was the 80s. Her cheekbones glistened with baby-pink blush and she always wore a variation of red lipstick. She was wild and a traveler at heart. Before they had children and duties to attend to, my mother and her sisters would take a yearly girl’s trip. Those trips were the Irwin girls’ few shared moments in their later adulthood that no one else had but them. Later on, when the family got together, they would sit around and talk about these trips and how even though they were so vastly different, they did love each other for those few weeks out of the year.

The one thing the Irwin girls shared without intention was their voice. The southern roots always shone through with each word that they spoke. The elongated vowels and touch of hospitality in each word was proof of who they were.

What made the Irwin line so special was that for every girl there were two more in the next generation and for every four Irwin girls there was one boy. The Irwin family was no stranger to hormones and sharing cycles like vintage t-shirts. By the time my cousins and I came along, the girls in our generation outnumbered the boys 8 to 3. 

Sleepovers were mandatory every Thanksgiving. We would lay out a pallet across the basement floor and giggle while sneaking more brownies than we could eat from upstairs. Some of my fondest memories from the holidays were on that dirty basement floor. I remember the year I finally got a cell phone after begging my mother to buy me one. We had very little money, the least of all my relatives, so when I received a prepaid phone with 200 minutes loaded onto it, I was grateful. My cousins downloaded every Billie Eilish song we knew onto our music libraries. They had iPhones and bought their music from the iTunes store while I downloaded mine from a virus-prone third-party site. We sang together covered in our blankets and sleeping bags. We would make silly videos of inappropriate rap songs that we couldn’t comprehend the meaning of. At 4 a.m., we were still awake and now and then, one of us would remind the rest that under no circumstance could we awaken the adults who slept above us. We would sleep in until noon when the boys in the next room began to loudly complain about the video game character’s impending death. Still, we laid there late into the day until one of the Irwin sisters would yell down the basement stairs in her Kentucky accent to make sure we didn't sleep the afternoon away.  By the orders of the women above us, we would run up the stairs one after another. We knew nothing about the women except that they were our mothers, aunts and sisters. At that moment, I knew nothing except that they were mine and that I loved them. 

My mother loved to cook. She kept a recipe box on the kitchen counter by the stove, filled with her mother and grandmother’s recipes, which I now keep stored safely away under my bed. I never liked being in the kitchen nor did I ever have the urge to cook but that recipe box was like a matriarchal heirloom handed down to me and to not have it would be an insult to those who came before me. 

My mother was eclectic. From Keith Witley to Usher and Jay-Z, she loved it all. She would sing every lyric and miss every note. She was hilarious. Her spirit fueled her laughter and everyone else’s in the room. There was never a moment she wasn’t cracking a joke, even if it was the wrong moment. Most of all, she was filled with love. She would smile with her uneven teeth, slightly yellow, in a way that stays in your mind forever and warms your heart. There was so much about her in the early days that made me want to be just like her. Out of all the people in my life, she was the one I knew the most, at times I felt even more than myself. Yet somewhere along the line, with all the admiration and praise that I gave her, she somehow became a wound in my side. 

It was only a few years later that my mother’s mind would fall sick, and those family gatherings would spread farther apart. What was once every three months would become once a year and then not at all. The gatherings continued without us. I would watch the moments I couldn’t be part of from the Facebook page my mother helped me make at 12 on my prepaid cell phone. Because I was a child and needed my mother to be there, the world of women that I loved so dearly, for a while, disappeared. 

In the last 10 years of her life, my mother caused most of her struggles.  The beauty she radiated became dull and the person I was inspired by I grew to hate. 

She was a woman, and I was a woman, and I could no longer comprehend we both came from the glorious womanhood, the kind grandmothers make from scratch with their bare hands, the kind that gives life, the kind that fights tooth and nail to be seen and to be heard. 

When I was around 12 years old, my mother’s liver failed so she was always in and out of the hospital. My father, who for many years was no use at all, had his own set of struggles. My brother and I stayed with family friends and relatives who lived close until my mother was able to come home. People told me that she would need my help because I am her daughter. My brother was younger and would be no help at all. I was proud to help her because she was my mother and she needed me. 

 I handed her my servitude. If the dishes needed washing, I gladly did so. I enjoyed doing laundry since I had done that as my weekly chore before she fell sick. When we needed to go to the grocery my mother would drive my brother and I up to the front of the store, hand us a list she had made prior, and send us on our way. She would hand me her EBT card, pull into a parking spot towards the front and wait for us until we were done shopping. My brother and I played a game of who could find things the fastest, rummaging through the aisles until we found the item on the list. Every so often neither of us would be able to reach something so we would take turns climbing the shelves. The thought of asking for help never entered our minds. After the shopping was done, my mother would pop the trunk open and my brother and I would load the groceries into the back. She would then drive to the gas pump, pay for the gas and return to the driver’s seat. My brother and I took turns putting gas into the car. It was our favorite thing to do. Eventually, my mother’s grocery runs stopped. She no longer took us to the gas station. Our ventures outside of the house were secluded inside. My brother would play games like Call of Duty on his Xbox in the living room. He would sometimes let me play on easy mode so that I could say I had won something. 

On one of my mother’s bad days, when she could barely leave her bed, I decided to help her and clean up the house. Her bedroom was usually off-limits because she said it was her space and her responsibility to take care of. My mother snored so loudly that it echoed throughout the entire house. When she slept, she slept deeply so I thought I would surprise her by tidying up her room. Maybe it would make her feel better. 

The floor was covered in clothes and tissues, only a path from her bed to the door was clear enough to walk. I threw the clothes into her closet and cleared away the trash. I tackled the tables beside her bed, giving each item its own spot. I placed the ashtray perfectly beside her Marlboro Reds and dusted off the frame of her, my brother and I. I folded her clothes and placed them neatly into the chest of drawers, which had once been her mother’s. I revisited the closet to clean away the clothes I had put there temporarily. There was a large dark blue comforter with small cigarette burns from when my mother would fall asleep with them still in between her fingers. It was almost as big as me but somehow, I managed to move it. When I did, I was surprised to see another layer of blanket underneath. I pulled on it.

The clanging of glass bottles rang loudly, but still, she slept behind me. Underneath the thin yellow blanket were two large bottles and a dozen pint-sized ones. It was at that moment I realized why she wasn’t better. I understood why she slept for 16 hours a day. I understood why the walls in our house, once an off-white, were caked in yellow and now I understood why the sickness she claimed to have never ended. My mother was at the center of her own demise. She was a classic alcoholic. She hid her pain and her habits, and she did it well. Out of her own will, she added another overwhelming disease to her long list of sicknesses.

Many more instances left an unwanted taste in my mouth, but the most wretched bite came from the transfer of girl to woman. Yes, I was a child, but I had already become a woman.

It wasn’t until she died that I realized what womanhood was. I was surrounded by all these amazing, beautiful women for the earliest parts of my life who, in my eyes, did no wrong. I saw them a couple of times a year and they would make me pancakes and put curlers in their hair. They were these precious idolized women in my mind. They checked all the boxes for what I thought I knew, but it was just that. What did I know about being a woman at such an age? As I think back, my mother was never in these images from my childhood. I never once ran up the stairs to find my mother standing there because she was never who I wanted her to be. I spent the most time with her but somehow, I only remember the times when she was vacant. She never wore curlers. She smoked cigarettes and did taxes and was a mess. The heat of the world got to her; I just didn’t know it until I did. 

She hid these things well from me, which I thank her for. As a woman I know now what I saw as a girl, but as a girl, I saw what I needed to see. I wanted to be just like her, and I don’t regret it. I truly believed I saw everything, but I was a girl, and she was a woman.