I wasn’t listening, and I lost her forever

I’m having some retroactive guilt for now taking my mom seriously enough.

I suddenly remembered just now that she had told me she and dad weren’t doing so well financially, when I was in college. (I was reading a facebook post of people’s ideal jobs, and one person said housewife, but she’d need to work after her last goes to college).

I think I tried to discount it or block it out of my mind. Perhaps I thought that she sometimes exaggerated or tried to manipulate a bit. But she was for real. And other times where I didn’t accept church reimbursement and she said she needed it, it was all true. She passed away with a lot of debt, and I should have taken her more seriously when she said they weren’t doing well financially.

She’s not one to have ever really made me worry about finances. In fact, she protected me from it. But there were small comments like “We’re not people meant to have money because we spend it when we see it” (at Olive Garden) and this that made me think that things were already much worse than how she was representing them.

Honestly, I wish a lot of things could be different, but we’re here now, and all I can do is try to live a happy life / my best life. I’ll always love my mom, and I’m sorry to her for a lot of things, but we both know the love we shared, and nothing can replace that. Ever.