She's My Mother, After All
By Lindsey Norine
@lindsnorine
I walk down the stairs, monitor in hand, and slump on the couch as a sigh escapes my lips.
“She can be so frustrating!” I whine. “She firmly believes she is in charge of everything. Today I think she might be right.”
My mom chuckles and sets down the dish rag at my sink. After a morning of chasing around my 2 and 3-year-olds, she could have gone home when I went upstairs to deal with naptime. Instead, she tackled the growing mountain of dishes for me.
She offers a knowing smile and crosses the room to sit next to me, “I remember those days oh so well.”
“I know she is a tiny me. And I’m sorry, again.” The words come easily, and I mean them.
She laughs good naturedly. I briefly rest my head on her shoulder, grateful to be near her.
It hasn’t always been this way.
***
In another kitchen, in a different decade, my mother follows me around as I prepare a quick dinner for myself. She peppers me with questions I already answered this morning. I’m in a rush and I don’t have time for this dance. Impatience rises to the surface and I snap at her, something sarcastic.
My mother crosses the kitchen floor and slaps me across the face. My cheek stings, hot and flushed. The sound of the strike rings for a moment and we both stand still, unsure of what to do next. I clench my teeth and hope the tears welling in my eyes won’t spill over. I’m shocked by the unexpected brutality, but the emotion that crosses my mom’s face is even more bewildering—fear. The flicker is brief. Her lucidity slips. She gives way to the daze of the drugs. She is gone, again.
I am 18, and my mother has already been on a steady cocktail of morphine, Vicodin, codeine, and OxyContin for two years. A doctor—I’m not sure which in the carousel of them—recently added fentanyl, yet another prescription drug they assured would finally dim her pain. Granted, she may need rehab to come down from this one when she heals.
If she heals. If she doesn’t die, that is.
No one knows what’s causing my mom’s illness. It began with a permanent migraine, a constant searing pain with no reprieve. Next were the muscular seizures; shock-like spasms every few seconds—awake or asleep—leaving her in constant fatigue. The left side of her body tingles like splinters in her nerves.
Neurologists, orthopedists, psychiatrists, and pain specialists alike have all been stumped by her strange mixture of symptoms. All they do is add another pain medication, speculate, and hand her off to another specialist. One doctor had the audacity to say this sickness is all in her mind.
My dad exhibited extreme self-control by only shouting at him that day. I don’t see my dad much anymore, and it’s not because I’m avoiding home. He works constantly, desperate to make ends meet. He doesn’t realize I know, but I overheard a phone conversation one night. Paying for the doctors has already drained most of the college savings accounts and their retirement fund. The house will be next.
I keep my smile expertly intact when I lie. My best friend knows the headlines, but even she doesn’t fully know the gravity of the situation. She doesn't see the undercurrent of fear that is my constant companion. No one knows how bad her condition has gotten.
My mom has lost her grip on reality. She repeats herself on a loop, forgetting where the conversation began or what has already been said. The drugs inflate her emotions and cause explosive incidents where she is totally outside herself. Moments where she acts like someone completely different from the mom I grew up with, the one I knew. The mom I grew up with would never slap me across the face.
I’m almost out, though. I will maintain my perfect GPA, graduate with honors, and collect the 29 college credits I have already earned. I chose a prestigious private university and have been offered a great scholarship. I will go and start the rest of my life away from the hurt and darkness. I will continue to be fine, no matter what happens.
I don’t need my mom anymore. The vague, confused woman in her bed isn’t my mom anyway.
I countdown the days until I move into my dorm, aching to get away. But deep down, in a place I won’t acknowledge, I know I chose this college because it is only thirty minutes from home.
I couldn’t bring myself to go too far. Just in case.
***
My parents are the first to visit after I give birth to my first child—a daughter. They arrive at the hospital at midnight, two hours after she was born, bursting to see their first grandchild. After spelling out her name (twice) and many rounds of photos, I declare loudly I am ravenous. My dad offers to get food and takes my husband along. I consider arguing about the arrangement, but french fries call to me. I would much rather have either of the men stay with me instead of my mom.
I really should be kinder. She has fought so hard to be here.
My mom has had five major surgeries since I left home for college, most on her spine. It turned out her condition did have a name, “Severe stenosis of the C5, 6 & 7 vertebras with atypical anatomy.” The nerves in her neck—rather than lying parallel in neat rows—were in a terrible, knotted mass, unlike anything any of the doctors had ever seen.
The surgeries to fix my mom’s affliction never came with optimistic odds. So I fortified the wall between us with each one, extricating every bit of my dependency on her like the neurosurgeons did to her damaged nerves.
The wall is still around me, here in this peach-colored delivery suite. I look down as my infant lets out a long, throaty shriek. A ridiculously tiny wristband encircles her delicate wrist, bearing my name.
“She’s probably hungry,” my mom offers.
I know, I think, closing my eyes to let them roll without her seeing. I try, awkwardly, to use the nursing cover from my baby shower for the first time. It is a glorified infinity scarf—how do I do this?
My mom says gently, “It’s okay if you don’t want to use that. Do what you need to do to feed your daughter.”
I begin a protest, “No it’s okay, I’ve got this. I need to figure out this thing anyway. I’ll just…” I sweat and struggle for another minute as the crying escalates.
My mom gives a wry smile. Typical, I bet she thinks. Doing it all on her own.
“Honey, it’s just me,” she says instead. “It’s your mom,”
Unexpected tears prickle behind eyes, unrelated to the nursing cover or the fatigue from giving birth. I look up from my daughter’s tiny face and into the eyes of my mother. She must have felt this love for me when I was born. I bet we had matching wristbands, too.
My mom often reminds me I will always be her baby. Those words always fell on sarcastic, annoyed ears—until I held the seven pounds of my own heart outside my body, this tiny bundle of perfection crying in my arms.
I toss the nursing cover away, pulling my daughter close to latch the way I learned in my breastfeeding class (which I totally aced).
“You and I weren’t able to nurse, you know,” my mom says. “I tried for so long. But it didn’t work. It’s okay if it doesn’t work for you, either.”
Her comment feels like a dig at me, as if it’s somehow my fault I rejected my mom even as an infant. But I linger on her last words. I hear the grace she’s trying to give me, grace I need to have for myself. She knows I am going to tackle parenthood with my same toxic perfectionism that dragged me into adulthood.
After all this time, she knows me. I was the daughter she breathed prayers over, the one she promised to always be there for—just as I have been promising my own daughter.
My mom’s emergence from the abyss of pain, drugs, and multiple surgeries was nothing short of a miracle. Although her body remained war-torn from the years of battling unseen illness, she was unmistakably my mom—the real one. Like a vision transported before us with her mind intact and her loving arms waiting to draw us back into the fold. But I was gone.
Her brief, broken shards of memories were all she had to explain my transformation from high schooler into the married mother in front of her. She must have been mourning me for so long. What would it feel like to wake up and realize I’d lost years with my own daughter?
It dawns on me that more life can be born in this room than my daughter, if I only try. I don’t know how to say it, but I work up the courage to just begin.
“Mom, I’m sorry.” I haven’t uttered those words in a decade. I swallow the lump in my throat and try, for the first time, to chisel away at the wall. “I’m sorry I always push you away. It’s not your fault, I know I shouldn’t do that. It’s just been… it’s been,” I pause, “Hard.”
“I know,” my mom responds quietly.
I can tell if I don’t keep going I’ll never be able to say it. “I want to … to try again. I don’t know how…” The wall crumbles. My tears flow in earnest.
The look she gives me says it all. She already knows what I mean.
She’s my mother, after all.
Guest essay written by Lindsey Norine. Lindsey's goal is to remind women that they are seen, known, and deeply loved. She is married to her crush from church camp and together they have two majestic, hilarious babes—and another on the way. Her tribe resides in central Iowa, where she holds down a day job as a voice teacher and adjudicator. When not singing or playing make believe, Lindsey sneaks away to write in coffee shops while someone else wipes her children's bottoms. For more unvarnished stories on motherhood, follow her instagram and visit her website.