a flashback

My brother called me tonight and said he came across the memoir I wrote for an intro communications class in college. It's about our mother. I wrote it seven years ago, which is hard to believe. He suggested I post the story on my blog, since it really only exists as the paper copy he found and the saved Word document on an old disc I dug up just now. And I guess sometimes, it feels like if it's not on the Internet, it doesn't exist.... Anyway, I thought that to be a good idea.

Now, I know that I promised one of my loyal readers that I would dedicate at least one post to sheer smut, pop culture, mindless drivel - you know, the kind of writing that gets people to comment. Well, that'll be next, but the timing seemed right to post this memoir.

A couple words of caution, should you choose to continue: It's long. It's kind of sad. And it does reference woman stuff. If you don't want to read it and get all down and personal, that's OK. Just wait a bit and I'll post mindless drivel. (Oh and please remember I wrote this in 1998, which the help of an amazing professor who I often credit for my entering journalism, since she was the one - after working with me on this piece - that I should consider it. Anyway, here it is.



It is a sticky Alabama afternoon. I have this heavy feeling in my stomach, and I can feel my heart thumping loudly in my chest. What am I going to do now? I have already cleaned my entire room, watched TV until my eyes were sore, and even thought about picking up Kidnapped. I am supposed to have it read for school in the fall, but the picture of the ship on the front just looks so boring. And the letters are so small.

My hand pushes the pen in circles that curl around into my name on the paper. It looks so elegant. I can hear the girls next door squealing and laughing in their playhouse with the bright teal cloth roof that peaks over our fence in the backyard. What a hideous color green next to the trees.

I force up the window stiff from layers of dried paint and catch a slight breeze, my mind wandering to the days when I could look around me and smile, not a care in the world.

***

The breeze tickled my face carrying with it the sweet smell of ripe fig trees and hints of my mother's clean shampoo. It was the smell of a childhood summer afternoon, when you worried the sun might never set and surrender the unrelenting heat of the day.

"And the season's, they go round and round," my mother sang softly. It was always the same song, always my favorite: a song that found a smile through tears and battled off the monsters in my nightmares.

"I know you aren't going to let me sing all by myself, sweet pea," she smiled peacefully, but I always like it best when she sings it alone. I tugged impatiently at my overalls while she licked her thumb and instinctively wiped the remains of a chocolate popsicle from my cheek.

"Shhh, do ya hear it?" I nudged my mother's knee as I leaned forward to see the big Maxx bus coming down the road. As it passed, I threw out a toothy smile and the two of us waved enthusiastically.

These afternoons had become a ritual for my mother and me. As five o'clock approached, we forgot the world around us and retreated to the front steps of the house. Here under the deep blue sky, we would sit together humming songs, sharing laughter and anticipating the daily wave from the bus driver, whom I know awaited our smiles. The five o'clock bus meant my dad's silver Gremlin would soon follow.

***

I can't really concentrate, but then, I am not sure what I need to be concentrating on. Anything really. Anything to keep my mind busy. It is so hot outside. It would seem like torture to be out there, yet this house doesn't offer much refuge either. It is so quiet, maybe I will put some music on, but I don't even know what I want to listen to. My fingers drum on the desk as I look out the window, amazed at how many things that have already happened this summer. And it is not even August.

***

It was late in the day when I finally rolled myself out of bed. The house was empty and I lay in the warm bed, avoiding the responsibilities of the day. My mom had been in the hospital for a few days so Dad had taken over the household duties lately, struggling to maintain the equilibrium of the family for my brother and me.

He tried his luck in the kitchen, relying on frozen fish sticks and bagged mixed veggies, a far cry from my mother's creative meals. On top of his demanding position at the hospital, his days were compounded with carpooling, grocery shopping and picking up his shirts from the cleaners.

Still in my underwear with no plans of interrupting my laziness, I shuffled downstairs to the kitchen for the bowl of Rice Krispies. I stopped by the bathroom on my way to occupying my lanky, eleven-year-old body with television until someone came home, filling me in on my own tasks for the day before we went to visit Mom.

I sat down on the toilet and caught a glimpse of something foreign: a small dark spot in the middle of my panties. I blinked, took a deep breath and looked closer, still there. A wave of panic ran through my body. I went directly to the top shelf of the cabinet where I had bashfully stashed a box of maxi pads my mom gave me months before with the brief you'll-be-a-woman-soon talk.

After sticking one to my panties, I stood up, feeling the unfamiliar pillow between my legs. What the hell do I do now? With my mom unreachable in the hospital, I had no choice but to page my dad.

"Uh...Dad, I... um, I think I just started my period," I mumbled, my face hot with the mortification of saying these words to my dad, who had always seemed so distant to the development of his daughter.

"What… you, oh, wow. Well," he hesitated, swallowing a nervous chuckle and searching for the appropriate words. I could almost picture him on the other end of the line, overwhelmed with my call. "Congratulations! Do you know what to do?"

"Yeah, dad. I just want to go see Mom." I fiddled with the phone cord, my fingers trembling. Congratulations? God, what a nightmare.

"OK, I'll be home soon," he said. I hung up the phone and sat there with a thickness in my pants, nervous of the confrontation with my dad and a little angry that my mother wasn't in the next room for this.

***

I look around my room. Something to do. I have always had the same room, with the same view, even arranged the same way, with my huge queen size bed jutting out from the wall and taking up most of the floor space. My mom used to want to put a lace canopy on the long wooden posts, and I dreaded the idea. She also used to want so desperately to braid my hair, but I felt like Pippy Longstocking and her tugging at my hair always made me cry. So she promised to pay me a dollar each time I let her do it, saying I looked like her little princess. I guess a dollar was a lot to me then, but not enough endure the hair braiding.

Mornings carried a dance of familiarity for my mother and me. My father would welcome in my day with a tap on the door and a good-morning whisper, my cue to tiptoe into their bedroom. I would crawl into the tall bed and sling my eight-year-old body on top of my mother, her soft, round stomach cushioning me. I laid my head on her warm chest and listened to her breathing while she watched the morning news. Her smooth fingers combed through my hair. I could smell the coffee on her breath as she asked if I had sweet dreams the night before. I would lie there in the ritualistic comfort of my mother until my dad would call from the bathroom where he fixed his tie and brushed his teeth, reminding me to get dressed for school.

As the cancer slowly takes pieces of my mother from me, my visits to her bedroom grow infrequent. The warm, inviting feel of the room was replaced with a thick air of sickness. The room smells stale and lifeless, as if the slices of sunlight from the windows can't compensate for the shadows of the disease.

The bed, which hasn't been made for weeks, reminds me of the chaos of the moment. Half-read books and reading glasses are hidden among the plastic pill bottles, littering the bedside table. The words of Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton are lost to the specific dosage demands of each medication. It is like this room doesn't belong to the house and was added on as a sinking reminder that something was just not right. The table against the wall holds old pictures, one of my parents' wedding 21 years before, the only time in his life that my dad shaved off his beard, smiling big next to my mother in her bravely short dress. The walls, painted a soft rose color to match the flowers on the comforter, doesn't breathe the life the house had always known.

I wander downstairs to the kitchen that carries a heavy silence, empty of her bellowing laughter while she talked on the phone and her orders to us to pick up our shoes from the bottom of the stairs. On the wall behind the stove she has painted a delicate wreath of flowers on the tiles, adding to the room her creativity that seem to touch every corner of the house.

Outside of the kitchen window I can see her herb garden, where rosemary, parsley and thyme were once pampered now remain thick with neglect. The garden, the teacup collection, the endless volumes of poetry, all linger while their creator lies in bed, slowly giving up. But as long as I avoid the bedroom, I can keep pretending that it is all a dream, and she will wake up one morning to coffee and the morning news and smile to her new health.

I am shaken from my thoughts as I hear my mother calling me into the bedroom where she is reading, making notes in the margins like any devoted writer does. My stomach feels even heavier as my feet drag me slowly upstairs, taking my time to hit every step evenly. She sits in the bed in her formless bright orange and pink nightgown, which she called a "moo moo". Seeing her in this blob of loud colors always brings a smile to my face.

"Oh sweet pea, I have so many things I want to say to you," she looks at me with her head tilted to the side and her eyebrows raised in concern.

She had given up on coloring her once-black hair and let the gray streaks frame her plump face, making her look so beautiful and wise. Her dark eyes are deep with experience, and her fingers, carrying engagement and wedding rings, are wrinkled with time. I fear I won't recognize her, as I look into her eyes, hazy with distance as it pulls her away. What if I can't see her strength and beauty I know, and that I only catch glimpses of when I look at myself in the mirror? I curl up into a ball and snuggle close to her, feeling her smooth skin that now drapes limply on her bones brush across my face. All I can do was shake my head, the tears flowing uncontrollably before either of us can speak.

"Sara, I know this is hard," she whispers, her thumb gently stroking my eyebrow, the way she did when she sang me to sleep. "And the painted ponies go up and downÂ…" she would sing. My body shakes with anger and resentment. I close my eyes and imagine myself eight years old again, cuddling with my mother as we received the day.

"You have to be strong for your father and brother, Sara," she says softly.

This isn't how it is all supposed to happen. We have such big plans. She had promised to take me out to lunch as soon as she was well to celebrate my untimely first period. This is my mother who was supposed to take me bra shopping, giggle about my first boyfriend, and be there for my first child.

I sit up and looked at her. In front of me is the strongest woman I have ever known, and I realize that was what I was to become. All of the things she had ever told me, all the moments I took for granted, all the times we were cheated of seem to come together at once in her eyes.

"You know that you have to keep going, and become the most beautiful woman you can, the woman I have taught you to be." I shake my head. I am not even 12.