I didn't post forever because our Internet was down for a day. Our Internet provider promised it would be one day, but their days must be counted more biblically than everyone elses. 'To DISH Network a day is as a thousand years...' Punks. But I got them back. I called on Saturday when Justin needed to turn in his homework for online classes, and I wept like the mad, pregnant woman I am. There's nothing like having a customer crying on the phone to really turn someone's day cloudy. Perhaps, I was too cruel.
Noah decided to mark my first real mother's day by getting up at 4:15 in the morning, demanding milk, and then wanting to play instead of going back to sleep. The refusal of sleep lasted all day, and he was a joy to be around. He has been sleeping very well, so the sudden turn of events was both unexpected and untimely. All I wanted for mother's day was a nap, which was a request more impossible to fulfill than if I had wished for a Cadillac full of conflict diamonds.
However, Mother's Day night, my sleepy, grouchy boy, my own tired brain, and the week approaching, lost all meaning and matter in the light of the world crashing down. And this is more why I haven't blogged in a month.
Sunday morning my mother told me she had some concerning symptoms the night before. While working in the garden, she had pain in her face and jaw, felt feverish and generally ill. She googled symptoms for the most concerning of potential causes, and it didn't look like a stroke or a heart attack. She taught Sunday School, taught children's church, and was seemingly fine and dandy for the day. That night I got a call that my dad had taken her to insta-care. I still wasn't too worried. Our family frequents insta-care with an annoying amount of regularity, and generally, on holidays. We really ought to make it part of our traditional celebrations. Now dad will read the Christmas story, and now we will all bundle up and drive to Insta-care whereat we will have IVs and cake.
The following morning I got myself together, saw my husband off, fed my son, and lived my usual life. I decided to call my folks to make sure all was well. My dad answered the phone. "I'm going to the hospital, to see your mom," he said. The hospital is not Insta-care. "She had a heart attack."
There had been words after that. They were reassuring, explanatory, tired, and worried. They said she was fine. They explained how they ran a tube from her thigh to her heart, put in a stent. Lots of words. I heard almost none of them. The tears were drowning them out. Tears are so ear-drum shatteringly loud. Part of it was just the shock. My mother takes very good care of herself: she eats well, she goes on her treadmill, she lifts weights (otherwise known as a twenty-two year old handicap daughter). She doesn't look the way she wants, but who of us does. She's never had high blood pressure, or struggled with heart issues. I could formulate a very, very long list of names of persons who I thought would be more likely to have a heart attack than my mom. And my name might appear somewhere on that list.
My mother has always had a sort of agelessness to me, like Galadriel. Somehow you imagine that she has age, but simultaneously she is not old and never seems to approach old. She has always seemed strangely immortal. Not an immortality of power, but just of continuity, as every morning she rises like the sun and feeds her daughter, and does her Bible study without withering or faltering. It doesn't quite make sense that she could have a heart attack. Elves don't.
A week after the heart attack she fell and broke her ankle. Now, she seems like Galadriel caged in a body that does not suit her. As a dancer, I try to have a great deal of respect for the body and mind, how deeply they are connected, and how much our physicality is a part of us. But it doesn't seem a part of her. The woman I know is strong, graceful, and quiet, full of joy and fire. The body is weak, and a little clumsy, with a heavy boot and two extra crutch legs echoing on the concrete. I know she will heal, and she will appear as the beautiful elven lady again. But somehow I imagine she will have aged. Perhaps she will return to her agelessness slightly older, become again immortal further along life's road. Or perhaps I will be able to comprehend her as more human, and maybe that will be good for us. To be alive and dying and patient for our uncaging to be truly immortal again.
Beautifuly said!
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