She alone is my mother

February 20, 2010

Jeremy and I are visiting some of my family right now, so I'm getting to spend some time with my mom. "This is the first time in two years that I've seen you healthy Abby," she said as she hugged me. It's true. And I'm revelling in it. But there have been moments of sadness and sweet reflection too.

"Harper should be here with us. We should be loading and unloading a stroller from the back of the car," she said, tears welling up in her eyes as we were out doing a little shopping. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for being another person who misses her. Thank you for telling me you miss her and think about her. I'm not alone.

And then I listened to her, my mother, talk about how happy she was I am healthy now. But I wasn't just listening to mom. I was listening to a mother talk about her daughter. She began sobbing telling me how scared she was for so long that I wasn't going to make it. She was scared for my physical being, that I was going to die, and scared for my spirit, that I would lose the will to live. As I laid in bed in the early hours of this morning, I pictured scenes she had witnessed and saw for the first time the frailty that caused her so much fear - saw her through her eyes, a mother's eyes. A mother's eyes who could do little more than watch as her daughter struggled in the hospital to make it to the bathroom. Who was there in the room when her daughter gave birth to her dead granddaughter. Who helped steady her daughter as she took her first slow and weak steps in recovery. Who was there the first time the colostomy bag was changed and saw her daughter laying in bed with part of her intestine sticking out of her stomach, cleaning up stool as it spewed out onto her stomach. The mother who stood in the hospital bathroom and gently sponge bathed her thin, naked daughter after surgery. The mother who sat quietly as her daughter sobbed to her husband in her grief, "I would understand if you left me now."

She was there for the raw moments of pure grief, grieving too, and watching helplessly. "I was so scared that I would say or do something that would cause you not to want to live any more," she sobbed. And we sat with our arms around each other. And I knew that there was no one else who understood what she had been through the past two years. The toll that it had taken on her. The burden she had carried. No one else, because she alone is my mother.