I needed a mother because I was having challenges communicating with my own. I’d asked my mother to stop speaking about me in the third person as if I were not there. I’d asked her to stop laying on guilt trips that I never see her, especially when I’m standing in front of her.
My mother is scared about her recent cancer report. She can’t figure out how to deal with that and with repairing her relationship with “her daughter” with the time she has left. She’s had cancer for over 20 years and hasn’t been this uneasy about it since she first told me she had breast cancer when I sat on the floor of my apartment in an old life and she looked down at me from the blue chair and said, “I have cancer.”
I cried then, because I was exhausted from my father having metastasized lung cancer that had traveled his spinal cord and my having to deal with it alone. He was dying and “no one should know.”
My mother is still living with breast cancer and I don’t know how I’ll continue to remain steady as it progresses. She, also, doesn’t want anyone to know.
Despite my better judgement, I shared the reason I looked anxious with my co-worker who is a few years younger than my mother, which would have made her a teenager mother. I shared because I’d been having a panic attack and the words just stumbled out of my mouth.
“I’m scared my mother is dying, but because we don’t communicate well, I can’t tell if she’s dying tomorrow or in six months or in ten years.”
I’ve gone back to therapy. I have the number of my mother’s doctor. I’m supposed to call him. I promised my therapist. Soon-ish.
I first had panic attacks, that I knew were panic attacks, when I was in my early twenties and my parents split up and I thought I was responsible for things I shouldn’t have been responsible for. Them. I remember freezing at the photocopier at work and not being able to catch my breath and watching the copier copy, page after page after page after page. It hurt. I never knew if the pages would end.
Years later, my focus looked strained again. My co-worker saw it. She got me to talk somehow. She knew I needed to talk. She shared her own family’s cancer stories. She talked a lot, but she also heard me. I was scared. My colleague is a mother and a good one, to her children and grandchildren and to all the children she isn’t a mother to.
“Mothering is being caught up in a combination of the quotidian and numinous and surrendering to both. It doesn’t require a child.” I said once in therapy more than a decade ago when I wanted to be a mother myself but couldn’t find a way to make it happen.
Before the end of the day I told my co-worker I’d be in the office the next day even though it was a work-from-home day. The distraction would help. I’d be more productive. I’d be around people. She drove me home.
The next day I went in to work and my co-worker brought in Kielbasa, sauerkraut, and roasted baby potatoes. Leftovers from a meal with her family.
“This is all for you,” she said.
All for me and I didn’t have to share with my other colleagues. I felt special. It was the best meal I’d had in a long time. It was store-bought but felt like a mother’s hug.
I realized I didn’t hug my mother when I last saw her. My grandmother stopped hugging when her cancer was in its final stages. I got scared again and worried that I’d offended my mother by standing my ground, asking her not to play games, so at the end of the day I texted to see if she wanted to go shopping. She couldn’t. She’d “overbooked” she texted back with a smile emoji. She was still mad at me and still very much alive.
Thankfully I had more Kielbasa and sauerkraut for another meal.
Here’s to delicious moments!
Warmly,
Tiffany
Heartbreaking.
Wow! That really got me. Thank you and I am glad you had the sausage