My daughter preened and primped for her first date tonight and here is my commentary on her personal milestone, "Ugh." She is growing, her perfection striking. She will take the world hostage with her abundance of gifts. My mother couldn't have felt that about me when I ditched high school and stole her cigarettes, when the cats I insisted on keeping in our apartment pooped in her work shoes. When I used her toothbrush to give the litter box a proper scrub, and then returned it to the bathroom without saying a word.
We survived the saggy bottom divide of life, arriving after the bloom has faded off newborn babies and marriages, when kids are in elementary school for what seems like 27 years, the house is always dirty, and everyone is tired and cranky, when even the back window of my car suffered a constant smattering of Cheerios...okay Froot Loops.
We weren't close then. She lived about 25 miles away and complained about the drive up to see us... She was busy developing her own life, grooming her future, and I was still furious about a childhood that had left me with the impression I was replaceable, forgettable, never good enough and always too bad.
We argued. I screamed in the phone and threw it against the wall. God, we hurt each other. I cringe remembering the animalistic way we strove to injure.
Inevitably, we drifted and I assumed some unlucky few get a mother they're not allowed to keep. Maybe some moms got kids like that, too. I must have been that kid to her.
Time went by like highway markers blur, observed on a trip to the unknown, always moving. Subtle changes in appearance and mood tinged who we used to be as we remained hypersensitive to the other.
Our conversations were short, civil, focused on safe topics like holiday functions and the news of who had died and who had been born.
We didn't know we were mellowing for a reunion.
She developed breast cancer and on the night of her lumpectomy invited me to sleep in her bed. I think she wanted the comfort of another body.
I said no.
After I put her to bed, I retired to the den and refused to think about mortality. Instead I chipped away at work projects until I dropped into a pensive rest, my body contorted to fit the kidney-shaped settee, so disappointed in myself that I couldn't offer her comfort.
I divorced twice and she got angry, abhorred my choices for new mates, hated I'd mirrored her life. I raged and so did she, a spate of words exploding over the phone again. And here I'd surmised we had thrown every knife. Silence became normalcy and I presumed she was busy trying to forget me once again. I tried to forget her, too, but it mostly resulted in tears springing to my eyes and a curious pain lodging in my throat.
I began to doubt if I had ever been loved.
Until I got sick, sicker than I had ever been. As sick as we-think-you-need-to-be-scanned-for-a-spinal-tumor sick, and she was there. A magician mother reappearing from the disappearing box, her actions speaking the words she'd wanted to say. She was captive. An advocate, as she placed her hand on my face and pressed me to her shoulder, as she wrapped her arms around me, held my cheeks in her wonderfully aging hands and kissed them as if I had just arrived from a faraway land. She regarded me with a sheen of tears frosting her vision, her face crumpling as she took my hand, as she apologized for not walking more slowly when I leaned on her in the neurologist's hallway, fresh and reeling off the diagnosis of the very rare transverse myelitis. She, a woman always projecting she meant business in her damn clunking heels, met my pace. Her hand was soft, warm and dry, and I felt like a little girl as we interlaced fingers for minutes, slightly uneasy, unable to let go.
I welcomed the overture emanating from her heart, of forgiveness, of sharing with me a secret time can steal if you're not careful: I love you and I always have.
Her heart now splinters at the robber who stole my trick of walking a straight line, who snatched my sensation of touch and made me doubt confidence in my body. She had never imagined having a child with a debilitating illness; it is so naked on her face.
As she stated in a tone I will always remember, shortly after she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer, "There are many things you imagine yourself to be, many labels we are okay wearing, can I be a cancer patient?"
I think her grasp on my disease is the same. Can I have a sick child?
She calls me her shining star, says she needn't worry about me because I have this ability to figure out any situation. Now, she holds a candle of her love for me from the window where she looks out on my life. It was always there. I simply couldn't see it. She reassures me, "I am here. You are my daughter." I longed for those words, am starving for them still and I go to her, ignoring the therapist who told me every time I knocked on the door, my mother wouldn't answer it. That I needed to stop knocking.
I couldn't.
I am so glad she heard me outside rapping, and let me in.
My mother's poem:
"It is my secret sorrow,
mourning moments lived in sadness.
To know the loss I shall not feel,
but sorely grieve life's passing.
A child so bright to warm the sun.
Days of promise yet unspun.
To yield to plans revealed in pain,
and raise the victory cup again.
I'll see God's grace in visions dim,
and surrender sadness pride to him"
By Ellen Elavsky
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Photo credit: Hilary Lauren