ARR 1988 - Flipbook - Page 142
saying, "If you spank one, you must spank them both." But my dad can't do
it. "But she is so little," he pleads as he scoops me gently up into his arms,
"and so cute." He has done the wrong thing, chosen the wrong words. He has
made of me a small wedge between them, the two pillars of my existence. I
cannot recall the spanking. I remember only the realization that my parents
have chosen up sides, and I am not to be on my mother's team. Although I
love my father very much, I am sick with the knowledge that my mother, the
strong, the influential one, has not selected me.
Now I am on the unpopular side again. I alone, it seems, am
determined that she shall not die. When she refuses the hospital's unpalatable sieved food, I carry in baby foods ofvarieties that I know will tempt her.
I spend hours feeding her, brushing her hair, holding her hand.
My mother survived and is at a nursing home, the dreaded place she
had hoped forever to avoid. Her heart is healthy, and her strong will sustains
her. That stubborn will is masked now, but not hidden, by a courageous new
show of acceptance. "When they ask you how everything is," she says in a
rare moment of true communication, "you just say everything is fine and
dandy." A cutting edge ofirony sharpens her voice as she concludes, "If they
ask you."
No one thanks me for helping her to reach this place. But there is
unfinished business between us. My mother has living yet to do.
Because my home is two thousand miles away, I can be with her only
intermittently. While I am able, I spend most ofmy time with her in a family
where affection is shown by, as John Updike has written, "varying degrees
ofreticence." The word "love" has served us only as a complimentary closing
to a multitude ofcards and letters sent and received. Now I want her to know
that she is cherished, and I express my love for her by every word and deed
that I can think of. Even when she thinks, as she often does, that I am
someone else, I tell her I love her. Even when she asks only for my brothers,
as she often does, I tell her she is strong and beautiful, and I love her.
Then one winter day as I arrive from California for our annual
Christmas visit, she knows me immediately and she says, "I'm so glad you've
come. You are a very important part of this family." I see that she wants me
to know something I have never felt sure about. We have chosen up sides,
and we have ended up on the same team.
As I prepare to leave her once again, she tells me, her deep, still
unfamiliar voice heavy with emotion, "Oh, I love you so much!" Words that
would never have been spoken if she had simply failed to awaken on that
snowy Sunday morning in March. My mother was not yet finished with
living. She still had some scores to settle, some records to set straight.
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