the momanomaly

On day five after surgery, I awoke from the last shards of morphine into a new version of my life. In this version, pain and discomfort was constant but normal, I was fairly helpless all the time, and my mother lived on the floor of my bedroom.

I need to tell you about those days with my mother because it was so otherworldly. She was not the same creature I’ve grown to accept and fear. She was placid, strong and giving.

Even better, my roommates seemed to calm in her presence. One of them got sick that first week and we spent a lot of time letting my mother baby us. We had our rituals of tea and TV and simple meals. When I felt well enough we walked to Trader Joe’s and I tried to keep my mother from bringing the whole store home.

And despite irrationally blaming my mother for my tanking love life (as though I’d have dates lined out the door a week after surgery [or ever]) and my flailing social life (think I’m bad with the phone when I’m NOT on narcotics?), the days were mostly lovely in that, “wow, she expects absolutely nothing of me,” kinda way.

By week two, several changes had occurred. One, my mother ran out of her nasal nicotine cigarette-replacement spray. At home she would have been pacing and gnawing. In my apartment she calmly drank tea and tooled at crossword puzzles. Also, I had gotten well enough to regain my rigid sense of personal space and felt a bit claustrophobic. Because I’m predictable, I ended up crying to my mother about how hard this must be for her, to give up her routines and her privacy to help me.

Here’s the cool thing: she totally caught me out in my pathological game. My mother, whom I’ve been defensively mothering for at least a decade now, coolly dissected my reactions and let me be upset about the things that upset me. I cried on the couch where I couldn’t quite sit comfortably and she told me it was okay, that life sucks, that THIS sucks. She allowed my puerile manipulations and excused them and in the end she was simply there.

And then Dad’s phone calls kept her phone buzzing off of tables. My roommates got used to saying, “It’s PapaBiv!” whenever they heard the ringtone. It was always PapaBiv. He had decided to pick us up.

It wasn’t until my father had called from Schenectady that I noticed my mother unraveling. She started having coughing fits and slipping snide comments into her usually gentle instructions. She made and edited lists out loud, urging her frantic energy onto my plate and begging for me to pick it up.

The night before my Dad rolled in I was able to hear what she’d been saying for a few days. “It’s been so nice to be here, among girls. I never had that. I never lived on my own with a bunch of girls and had my own life.” By the time Dad reached Springfield, those phrases became a spite-tinged litany.

On Christmas Eve, when my father had become completely irascible, I caught my mother’s eye and said, “Y’know, there are a lot of nice men in Boston.” There was a true wistfulness in her eye as she washed out wine bottles in a series of deft, well-practiced movements.