Something miraculous has happened, just in time for my birthday.

When I first decided to put up personal ads to find my mom a date, I was hoping for something big to happen. After things went south with the last of her dating adventures, she sort of gave up for a long time. She was tired of boyfriends that were sort of like roaches, they always seemed to come swarming back into her life, imposing themselves on her time and patience. Her normal routine became wrapped up entirely in my sistr, which put a lot of stress on her and on their relationship. Her usual evenings began to consist of hiding upstairs in her room, reading and just avoiding my grandmother. I understood it probably better than she ever knew, because I remember feeling like that house was eating my soul slowly, smothering my will to live instead of just exist. There's something about my grandmother that infuses any space she occupies with abject misery.

I can't adequately express how vastly my life improved when I escaped that house. It was like a cloud of hot, foul air finally cleared and I could breathe and have peace for the first time in over a decade. It was like I had finally escaped from a suffocating cesspool and found that I still knew how to be fully alive. I went to school, I travelled, I explored myself, I met Chris, I learned how to be happy again. The hardest thing, the only hard thing about leaving home, is knowing that my sister and my mom are still trapped in that noxious, unhealthy hell hole. My grandmother is like a malignant tumor, leaching off the goodness and life of everyone around her, putting out only hate and other degrading, debilitating things. It's been plaguing my mom for almost ten years now, ever since she put her personal life on hold and stopped looking for a happiness that would be just for her.

And it killed me inside. I remembered how alive my mom was before, when she had someone to take her out and make her feel fun and free. She had gone from having an active and thriving social life before my sisters dad came along to moldering in her room with not much to look forward to. She's the person who taught me how to be happy and successful, how to give and receive unconditional love, and she was aging, literally, before my eyes, way beyond her years. My sister had never even experienced the vibrant, happy, social person I knew still existed somewhere inside her.

Her date on Sunday has helped bring back the happy in her voice. I talked to her on the phone today and she sounded like the mom that I remember from my early adolesence. She's not in love, she hasn't met her soul mate, she's not picking out curtains, she just had one good, pleasant date, and the effect on her is just amazing. And it's just what I wanted for her. Sure, it will be great if it turns into something wonderful for both of them, but even if they just end up as friends or as casual dates, it just thrills me to no end that she's going out, having fun, escaping the house for a while and having someone to make her feel good. This is doing more for my spirits than any drug could, I feel like I've fully got my best friend back.