"What do you expect your relationship with your child will be like?" asked a well-meaning friend. I was pregnant with my first child. "I don't know that I have any particular expectations, but I do hope that we'd be able to talk." "About what?" he persisted. "Anything at all."
What he didn't know was that I'd never been able to accomplish this with my own mother, leaving an insurmountable hole in our mother-daughter relationship.
In her 30s, high-powered legal career beginning to unfold, she suffers severe traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), resulting in life-altering cognitive, emotional, sensation, and motor function impairments.
Past the healing of open physical wounds, one of the main focal points in her recovery becomes language and speech therapy. As dedicated and hard-working as she is, the road is frustrating, fraught with a constant search for the right sound and word, sentence composition and articulation. She frequently screams and moans, unable to communicate that she would like me to go buy chicken from the store, that she is looking for a black blouse in her wardrobe, or that the bandage around her head needs to be tighter. Never before has she felt more isolated. Never before had I felt the need to connect with her more.
Our interactions are limited at best, mentally mutilating at worst. As she learns to walk unassisted, she forges on to gain a degree of independence and normalcy by walking the 5min distance to the grocery story to buy bread, or milk, or whatever. I go with her. I listen to her say something unintelligible, unfiltered, or inappropriate to the butcher, or cashier, or the person stoking the shelves. I watch the expressions on their faces change from grimaces of confusion to annoyance, to plain outrage. They call her crazy, become threatening. She clings to her dignity by becoming just as outraged and alarmingly defiant, seemingly unafraid. I try to protect her, to make it all better with carefully chosen words. Sometimes I help, sometimes I fail. These little scandals, however imminent, are fleeting; a small part of the general landscape.
At the heart of this, is the heavy feeling in us both, that our communication is limited to the daily, reptilian tasks of surviving. Alas! Forever unrelenting, the mother in her cannot rest until she calls me over repeatedly to teach me about rights of womanhood through her books, issues of physical and emotional health. Months in and out, she pulls out books from the shelves and hands them to me. Pointing to already open pages, she asks me to read out loud, making sure that I get it, that I follow through. She gets her voice heard.
Now, the challenge is in getting myself heard and understood. I find myself having to say things over and over again, in the hope that she will make the connections, that she will know my meaning. I hold my breath at the end of each phrase, maybe she got it. Her brilliant, jumbled mind cannot help but repeat the last word in my sentence, and ask off-handedly the question, to which I'd given an answer moments before. Thus, we are pulled in circles, tried and failed verbal communication becoming the norm, the definition of our relationship.
Skip forward 20+ years, we've become especially adept at saying: "I love you!" The words are always ready to roll off the tip of her tongue. They've acquired a many-fold meaning: "I'm happy!", "Call me!", "I'm worried!", "I'm sorry!"... "I love you!" is our mantra, our prayer, our hope and despair, our world condensed into a single phrase.
Very moving! How come this is the only blog up right now?
ReplyDeleteIt was amazing feeling to read this post. It was that missing chapter when we first became friends and is now what you choose to talk about and to inspire with... Being a ("bestest") mom has become your path to discovery, to healing, and to blossom. Congratulations!
ReplyDelete