Coal to Diamonds Read Online Free PDF

she got out of the hospital.
    It was another couple of months before she settled down. There were a lot of whirlwind romances. Men came and went, which was fine for my mom, but it wasn’t so good for her daughters, who were right in the middle of their formative years.
    Mornings brought their own discomfort as Mom, whose understanding of what was appropriate got messed up so young, recounted the details of her one-night stands as if Akasha and I were her girlfriends. We sat at the table one morning while a one-night stand dropped her off. We weren’t her daughters but her confidantes. I felt a nameless, itchy feeling—a bad one—that was all mixed up with another feeling: happy that my mother was happy, happy and home, not in the hospital, not away in the dark but there in the light with us. My mother’s attention was spread so thin that I never got much of it, so there was something perversely sweet about those mornings, acting like high school girls gossiping after a night of sneaking out to meet boys in the woods.
    With my mother trying to reclaim some lost youth, and my sister and me aged by our own shitty circumstances, we met in some inappropriately teenage middle. My mom often flung herself into a kitchen chair, taking off her jacket to reveal just a bra underneath, worn like a shirt. I was always bleary from a night of badsleep, waking in the darkness only to have to fight off the terror of it. Now I felt myself resisting a different dark feeling—that it was wrong to know so much about what my mother was doing out there with the men she met.
    This is where life got really confusing, where Mom’s coming and going turns into a blur. Too scared to sleep in the dark house without any grown-ups around, I stayed at Aunt Jannie’s more and more. Life got less and less stable, and I found myself living nowhere but staying everywhere: my mother’s house sometimes, Aunt Jannie’s sometimes, depending on how many others were staying; my dad Homer’s sometimes, when I could handle sleeping all the way out in Georgetown—so rural it made Judsonia look sophisticated. If you’re feeling confused about where I was when, believe me, so was I. I was a transient in my own family, often sleeping in a different house every night.
    Moving back and forth among so many houses, I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. If anyone asked me where I lived I didn’t know what to say.
Here and there, I guess
. There was nothing to anchor me to any house. I didn’t have a dresser anywhere, but it didn’t matter, since I didn’t own enough clothing to fill one. I remember one bountiful teenage Christmas getting a winter coat and a pair of jeans thanks to Aunt Jannie. They, along with my love-worn Pearl Jam T-shirt, were the only pieces of clothing I could truly call my own, since by that time my puffy-paint chanteuse shirt was too threadbare to wear and wound up shredded into cleaning rags, stored under Aunt Jannie’s kitchen sink. At the start of high school I really had nothing—no home, no clothes, and no idea how messed up my situation really was.

6
    Every so often Mom would totally surprise me by deciding to act like a real mom. An overprotective-type mother who wanted me around, wanted to know where I was, kept an eye on things. Although I partly longed for that type of mothering, once I got it I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t trust it. I knew my mother would only be able to keep her motivation up for a minute, and then men, or life’s chaos, would take her attention back and I’d be left with less of her than before. And if my mother didn’t quite know how to be a mother, at that point I didn’t really know how to be a daughter.
    My mother had a new friend from work, Jo Ann, who, seeing my mom struggle with her unruly kids, tried to help out the best way she knew how. Jo Ann set Mom up on a blind date with some guy named Mike. Two weeks after they met, I came home from school and watched him lugging his