My Mom's Polio Foot

If you’ve read any of the stuff about my mom you know that she was a seriously troubled woman. In addition, she had a couple of physical problems. The arch of one of her feet was slightly deformed from childhood polio. It didn’t make her limp, but apparently it hurt her quite a bit. When I was a kid she would make us massage it, usually me. It seemed like I did it for hours at a time. That is probably an exaggeration, but however long it was, it was dysfunctional as hell for her to make me do it at all.

I hated doing it, she knew I hated doing it, and we both knew we hated each other. But there I was, rubbing the damn thing. It didn’t even seem like it helped. She would just sit or lay there and read, eat, or both.

I think it was a control mechanism. That is, I think she used it to demonstrate to me, that she was in charge. I despised doing it, but if I complained about it, I’d catch a beating. This took place while I was in elementary school. If it had been a little later in my childhood, I’d have taken the beating every time. I used to sit there and massage her damn foot and she didn’t even say thank you. When she thought I’d done it long enough, she’d just pull her foot away and wave me off.

If she knew what I was thinking while I was massaging her foot, she might have had a change of heart. Yes, I was thinking about killing her. I was picturing all the different ways I could do it, and going through the process in my mind.

One time she made me ride my bike to a takeout Chinese place at least a mile away, to pick her up some food. Then she ate it in front of me while I massaged her foot. When I was done I had to eat pinto beans with my brothers. When she was done eating, she put her leftovers in the fridge without offering any of it to us. We all knew better than to touch her food. She could be gone for next 3 days and we still wouldn’t touch them.