Not getting bitten was winning the game.

I remember back in high school I’d spend my mornings on the weekend shooting the shit with my mother at the kitchen table. We’d split a pot of coffee (or two), and chainsmoke a box of Winston Ultralight 100’s. Our mugs would be full to the brim with lightly beige colored coffee given the obscene amounts of cinnamon-hazelnut creamer we’d add in, and in no time the room would smell sweet and smoky as we spun ourselves into a web of deep conversation.

That’s how we spent most of our time together: at the kitchen table, talking. At the time she could still leave the house and drive around if she wanted, since the muscular dystrophy hadn’t completely taken her body yet, but each day was accompanied with debilitating pain so her mobility was very limited. She had her own special wooden chair, with rests and cushions, which was later replaced by a motorized scooter. That spot at the table was in the center of the house, at the center of everything.

And yet, for someone who seemed largely helpless on the surface, you realized very quickly that was not the case. Her presence carried a powerful and all-consuming gravity, like a black hole. You felt it as soon as you made eye contact, like she looked through you with her large, black, Sicilian eyes. You felt small, like a fly, staring into the eyes of a hungry spider.

We had a huge spider that lived under our porch when I was little. Playing with the spider was a favorite game. Sometimes it would jump on the stick I was holding to poke it’s web, but I never got bitten. Not getting bitten was winning the game. Like that spider, my mother was ruthless, cunning, and predatory. I remain thankful to this day that her disease didn’t (and couldn’t) take her mind. The gears were always working in her head to try to find an angle on a situation or someone, searching for weak spots or vulnerabilities to expose for her own gain. I enjoyed watching her “run game” on people and “stir the pot,” and was often the victim of it myself. I now know, as an adult, that those mind games tempered me against gaslighting and manipulation. For someone who was remarkably fragile (a trip and fall was a devastating event, leading to weeks in bed with more excruciating pain), she did not believe in fragility, and as her son, I instinctively took after her tendencies to poke fun, cause trouble, and push the envelope.

Her life story before I came along is largely unknown to me, which isn’t really surprising since she liked keeping secrets. Her childhood was supposedly topped full of physical and sexual abuse, but we didn’t talk about that, even when I pushed for details. Her silence largely spoke for itself. Over the years, my older siblings and stepfather would feed me snippets. Here’s what I know:

• Before she had children, she apparently spent some time travelling around the country in her Jeep Wrangler (with the doors ripped off) doing God knows what deep in the Midwest.
• It was shortly after that stint of raising hell in the dry deserts of Arizona (something to do with her side of the family, the first generation Sicilians who I never met, having possibly been involved with the mob and lots full of missing cars) that she later spent some time as a drug dealer in New York City.
• Then she had kids and went corporate. Hardened with years of mischief and what I can conclude only to be random acts of modern day piracy, she clearly became a natural leader in her office when it came to sales. Her colleagues used to brag to me, admiringly, that she could sell you the shirt off your back. A woman who could barely get out of her wheel chair could run circles around her bosses…yea, sounds about right.

My relationship with my mother was complicated; I didn’t cry at her funeral. Yet, there were many gifts she gave me over her lifetime. I inherited her unruly soul and am still, to this day, hard to please. That hunger for more ties me to her and has always alienated me from others. I think she knew that about me, and that’s why we had such a unique connection despite our differences (spiders are often solitary creatures, after all). When I look at one of her old driver’s licenses, a keepsake I took from her purse after she passed, I see someone young, beautiful, with bold, brazen eyes. The photo was taken from a time before I knew her, but I see someone staring back at me who understood what it was like to want everything the world had to give, and knowing that it would never be enough.