What broke me as a child was my mother’s death from breast cancer. But around that shattering, I became a person – and learned how to parent my son
try to remember her hands. They were younger than mine are now. I imagine her long fingers and yellow, uneven and unpolished fingernails. Or had her nails fallen out? I am eight, about to turn nine; she will be dead in two weeks. Today is Mother’s Day and I am allowed to stay home alone with her while everyone else goes to church. I am to be her helper, so I carry a basket up from downstairs. I set it on her bed. She is sitting up.
I want to know how to fold the two socks into a ball that stays put, a kind of magic trick, which, to me, is the only interesting thing about this task. She understands. She holds the two socks together; I see her hands, limp, no muscle. She can’t do it, she gives up, leans back against her pillow, closes her eyes – the relief of giving in to insurmountable pain., in which his wife, played by Carey Mulligan, finds out she has breast cancer. She is dying. This turn in the film surprised me.
Long before my son was born, I dreamed of him. I knew with some certainty that the comfort of this dream was the knowledge that something of what I had lost would be returned to me. Of course, being a child is not the same as having a child and being a mother is not having a mother; I know the damage caused by those who conflate the two, making their kids their confidante, friend or even parent.
Perhaps every parent who has experienced early parental loss lives with that fear always at the edge of consciousness, the hypervigilance of trauma. I know this is no good for a child; the legacy of my mother’s death could be a heightened anxiety passed on. So, for the 16 years of my son’s life, I have kept myself apart from that space of disintegration.
I write about my mom on the edge of my bed, saying prayers. How she hated the prayer of her girlhood Catholic training: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” That scared her as a girl, she said, that she might die before she woke. Why would they put that idea in the mind of a child? “They” were the Catholic church, which had informed her life.
I have never taught my son how to fold laundry and certainly not how to roll socks into a ball. Life as an adult and as a mother is often an endless series of small tasks, and folding laundry is one I have come to enjoy – the simplicity of it, particularly after sitting at a desk all day and trying to write a chapter or an essay. How simple and finite it feels to fold a shirt. How unlike writing a paragraph.
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