A Fool’s Lesson
Leaving Las Vegas 2022
During the summer to fall transition of 2022, I found myself holed up in the room designated for me at my mother’s Las Vegas house, much the same way I did as a teenager. This wasn’t my home, it was hers and every single day I was reminded of it by her. She had asked me to come and stay with her to iron out her end-of-life affairs and fine-tune her hospice situation before she died. So I dutifully came, only to be confronted with the same situation I experienced as an adolescent: trapped in a house, playing servant to mom, and being constantly chastised that I wasn’t enough.
Except at that point, I was forty-three years old and had been through many life-experiences along the way. Some people had told me I lived several lives. I was just wondering what the hell happened to me. My entire life I had worked so hard to conform to societal expectations and always falling short. I put myself through college, earned several degrees, clawed my way to a mediocre position in healthcare leadership, and survived two abusive marriages, only to be rendered childless due to trauma and abuse. I was broken in every way and trying to salvage any kind of relationship with my narcissistic mother as she fully embraced the attention of her hospice team. She knew how to put on quite the show.
While I sat on the murphy bed and staring at the deck of tarot cards in front me, I pondered how someone who studied science most of their life could even fathom diving into the occult. It was just a bunch of bullshit, right? Cold-reading, scamming, whatever negative concepts I’d gathered about the subject of tarot came to mind. But something deep inside persisted, a curiosity.
My tarot class was about to begin. I’d been a fan of Atlas Obscura for a few years, perusing its online content for brain candy and fantasizing about travelling to the strange and unusual places on the website’s pages. Until that point, I never had the extra money or time to splurge on one of its online classes. But with mom’s “impending” demise (more on this later), she had given me access to money as a way to lure me to stay with her in her “final” days.
For the month of October, I went to live with mom and attempted to determine if she and I could ever have a mother/daughter relationship that did not involve her abusing me. Less than a week into my stay, she had already resumed her abusive habits and leveraged her terminal diagnosis as emotional blackmail. Nearly every single time I resisted a negative or abusive comment, she would dismissively retort with, “I’m dying, it doesn’t matter anyway.” My feelings never mattered to her and she could continue to hurl passive-aggressive insults at me with abandon.
In an effort to escape mom’s constant criticisms and vitriol while I was staying with her, I signed up for a tarot reading class with Atlas Obscura and would be online for a couple hours every Tuesday for at least three weeks. The class began with the usual preview of things to come, activities to facilitate learning, and a general feel for the course. We were encouraged to spend time absorbing the concepts and history of tarot. Towards the end of class, an exercise was offered as a way to start our tarot journeys. “Card Of The Day”, or COTD as it was acronymed, would prove to be an auspicious practice.
The only solace I ever found in her house was behind the closed door of my bedroom. I would always immerse myself in educational endeavors to escape the hell that awaited me outside the bedroom door. If she thought I was studying, then she would not force her way in to force her will on me. Education was considered a sacred event, at least. Except now, I was pursuing an alternative education that would serve me well in the coming months. Drawing my first tarot card foretold of the education that was to come.
There it was staring back at me: the Fool. The jaunty, patterned frock of its character looked like a badly tattered carpet that was repurposed as clothing. The figure hoisted a hobo’s stick across one shoulder while a single flower sprouted from the opposite hand, alluding to growth and hope. Dangerously close to a cliff, the Fool looked up to the sky, as if daydreaming of new possibilities.
Ridiculous, I thought. But something deep inside me captured my focus on the figure. Could this mean something? My life had taken an all-too-familiar downturn since starting over in the northeast: I worked a thankless job I hated, the person I was “dating” treated me like an option, and my relationship with my mom was the same as it had always been. I was not living the life I truly wanted, that of a traveller and a writer. My secret dreams of being a digital nomad were buried deep and I had told no one.
But there it was, a sign of freedom. A sign of starting a new life, the way I really desired. Could I really do this? What did I have to lose? I had already lost everything in the second divorce, including my ability to have children and most of my possessions. I was nearing bankruptcy again, for the upteenth time in my life. My only blood relative was dying and I would be left with a decent inheritance to save me from financial ruin. And it could buy me time to figure out my situation, should I choose to embark on this new path.
I pushed down hope. Right now, I have a job that pays well and I don’t know what is next, I thought to myself. Still, I made an entry in my journal about the COTD. I recorded that event so I could remember later.
I stayed three more weeks with mom before taking my leave. We kept up our happy mother/daughter appearance to the world, as usual, during my stay. I lined up her healthcare directives and assumed full medical POA. Mom said I “had access” to all her financial accounts and could use any money I wished, as she was “dying”. However, she refused to address the topic of making me her financial POA as well. She wanted to keep her control.
Mom encouraged me to take my time driving back from Las Vegas to New Hampshire, telling me that money was not a problem for me to spend. I intended on holding her to that and using it to the fullest. I needed time to process my life and how I would move forward without her in it. Only time would tell.
