The moment I wrote it- and how my mother was always there.

There was a deep, slow moving swarm in my stomach as our flight departed Salt Lake City, Utah. I was headed back to Atlanta after an amazing four-day weekend with my "Running Girls Group," in Park City. Each year for the past few years we have used destination half-marathon races as an excuse to get away. That trip was so much more for me, it was a moment with God, not a God of dogma, but a real connection with my essence. I glimpsed my pure, perfect self and I felt the living energy that tethers us all, and it prompted me to write.

The mountains in Park City were so powerful, hushing me with a silent order to exhale. This was the start of the half-marathon, and also the finish line of my uncertainty. The trip occurred during a very precarious point in my life, I was starting to feel a different side of myself. The girls weekend commenced on the heels of me questioning my sexuality, and if there was any left at all-I was shut down. The weekend was not only served as an escape hatch, it also became an opening.

I started to think about divorce, and my mother, which brought up a lot of memories. My mother left her mark on marriage number two of four when she decided to leave Bill and move to Texas. She met him in a bar when I was two years old. He was a passionate man with a temper equally volatile to my mother's. AS with the marriage to my father,this one was short lived and full of life , but in this case it was suctioned out in a pitiful, stale clinic. She later told me how her choice wounded Bill to the core, I guess the mangled tissue wasn't enough to keep them together. Maybe that's why he drank so furiously, to quench the unborn thirst, and to drown in something other than the fighting between them. I often wonder if her decision was the trigger that pushed her through the looking glass and into the world of insanity.

Bill looked vulnerable and his energy was strangely familiar to her, and she was desperately alone. He was troubled himself, but he rode high on the blemished ego of his own saddle-he had game. He was a sensitive, quiet, introspective mechanic, but his demons were wicked drunks. She charmed him with her innocent, devil may care looks. Without hesitation, she exposed his weaknesses and seductively licked his emotional wounds. It wasn't long before they eloped at the county courthouse-not an unusual wedding, as she flashed her bright teeth. To this day she maintains that he really did love me, they were young and the problems reeked of distrust.

She left my father too when she was only nineteen, I assume they had some of the same issues, youthful ignorance, and her mental instability. We moved to my grandmothers house after their divorce, my grandmother had just been through a divorce of her own. My grandmother started a new career in modeling, which gnashed and gnawed away at the remainder of my mother's self esteem. I was a mistake that couldn't be undone and I was a daily reminder of her carelessness.

After she and Bill married we moved into another shabby apartment. There was a wooden counter that divided the kitchen from the mirrored dining room/den of our shagged out, circa 1970 place. The long ploy blend carpet fibers looked like a billion, blazing suns at dusk, all pebbled with tiny green and brown seeds. The seeds would roll off his Coca Cola tray that pictured a lady with a wide brimmed straw hat, smiling coolly. "Have a Coke and a smile!" His tray was a permanent fixture on the bar, I would sit up high on a cheep walnut bar stool watching him. He rolled with pride even though his hands were stained with black grease, and his fingers were bloodied. He worked methodically, meticulously, constantly rolling as his eyes peered past his curled mustache. He always ended with a slow, soft, wet kiss across the delicate, iridescent paper. Finally, the light of a flame, and scented smoke curtained the air.

Bill and I stayed home most nights together while my mom worked in the club. After the light had worn the day away, she headed into darkness, racing her Pinto around the corners. She was a tassel-wearing dancer at a local night-club. (I remember finding pictures of her in the tassels when I was eleven years old, the sequined costume was cat eye-green. The photographs left me at once, mystified, mortified, a little turned on, and disgusted.) I don't know who nourished and cared for my soul during that part of her/my life, but I have no recollection of ever having my hair gently pushed behind my ears at night. I think about this a lot when I gesture my love for my daughter when I play with her hair. My mother was on her own plane, fueled by narcotics and alcohol, and chaos was her final destination.