How’s your mom today buggy? Sometimes life is really simple. And sometimes it’s really complicated. Sometimes it seems to achieve the miraculous contradiction of being both at the same time. Now don’t worry, this isn’t me about to tell you all about the wisdom I possess or me about to let you in on anything profound. I just wanted to talk about my life for a second. It’s so hard to look back and set things in a specific order. Cause. Effect. What went wrong when and what went right because of all the wrongs. If a person isn’t healthy enough for their next round of chemo they might have to skip a week...she took a certain booster shot and kept her treatment on sequence. People tell you that hindsight is twenty-twenty. People make history books with neat little timelines that aren’t very crowded and the years are nicely labeled with a couple of sentences of explanation underneath each event. I try to do that too. The Byrds’ Turn! Turn! Turn! played after her nephew died by suicide.
In fact, some memories about my mom slipping away I hash out so often it seems to be the only timeline of my life that exists anymore. It was your baby brother’s “worst birthday ever!” when she was getting surgery instead of playing at the arcade But I know that there were so many other things that I remembered so clearly at one point in my life. A friend will mention a memory to me. A “remember when?” moment that was fun or stupid or important to us. And they might have to describe most all of the memory to me before I catch on again. She used to ask us all the time if she was going crazy. I’d pick up the thread that’d been fraying for quite some time and weave it back together. Of course you’re not going crazy, why would you say that? I know I used to be able to rattle off all my teachers for every single subject, kindergarten through eighth grade, without even pausing to think. I was so oblivious to the world built around me already starting to crumble. He travelled for work I thought to myself how could anything ever be more important than the book I’m reading that day and committing its entire plot and all the characters’ feelings to my own heart? She decided her marriage was loveless and she hated him. I’m never going to forget the exact feelings that accompanied a snow day. I’m never going to forget the way my sister and I would walk along an emptied out canal where the bottom had frozen over which made for just about the absolute perfect ice skating – that is if you count ice skating as sliding around in soaking wet uggs which obviously I do. Two more young cousins gone, mental illness, they played Dust in the Wind at the funeral. I’m never going to forget how one day we had a PE substitute teacher that finally let us play dodgeball. I’m never gonna be one of those people that can’t remember what year they were travelling where or what was going on in their life at that time. When I was younger, I had such certainty.
And sure, all this forgetting just happens because you grow up. I think maybe she should get some help. You think you’ll remember everything about what it was like to be young but then you forget. Mom checked us into a hotel last night, she didn’t think the house was safe. But I’m worried that I accelerated the process a bit by remembering some things so much more often than others. She called me four times last night at 2am. I'm worried I tried so hard to construct a narrative of my life that made sense to me that I instead achieved the opposite. Your mom never sleeps during the night anymore. I took a jumble of memories and decided to jumble them up some more. People say to leave well enough alone. People, however, also say the only way to move forwards is to go backwards. I can’t tell grandma and grandpa, they get too sad. And so I keep jumbling and arranging and trying to go backwards and forwards. Hell! Left, right, let’s throw all the directions in there. She disappears for entire days sometimes and there’s no one in the house but the kids. Toss some memories out. She locked me out of the house. Patch some here and there, a little bit of embroidery and embellishment on others. Behold. A patchwork quilt where no one can quite decipher the pattern. Both my kids knew her as the fun, goofy aunt growing up. But I was never very great at sewing anyways. That bitch! People say every time you’re remembering something you’re actually only remembering the last time you remembered it. Your mama’s my perfect girl, you take care of her for me, alright? So if recalling a memory more often makes it less accurate, where does that leave me? The product of a lifelong game of telephone that ends only when the loop breaks, when I forget entirely. You guys know I love your mom, right? She’s just difficult sometimes. How was your mom today buggy?
But in the meantime, since I think we’ve at least established by now that I haven’t forgotten completely, I suppose there’s nothing left to do but remember again. She won’t let my brother go to school anymore. In books and movies and plays and epics, it feels like more often than not we’re warned in some way about the unreliable narrator. We’re asked to consider if what they’re telling us makes sense and we have to choose whether or not we’re going to believe what they say is going on with the story.Yeah...she’s just sitting there in the dark on the bathroom floor. I always wanted to believe them. Sometimes I was right and there turned out to be more truth than fiction in their words. And other times no matter how much I wanted to trust a character, and to root for them, they’d let me down. “Is she in crisis?” “Yes” “Do you think she’s a danger to herself or others?” ...“I don’t know? I don’t think so?” I wonder what side of the reliability spectrum I’d land on. People say you’re the author of your own story. People say they want to be the main character. I don’t really buy into much of that nonsense.The mental health system sucks. Especially when other people feature so prominently in my own memories. She surrendered the pets to the humane society. She changed her mind a few days later and there was only one left. Surely the people in my memories must be holding their own pens and scribbling in the margins and crossing things out in my mind right along with me. And honestly I never had that “main character energy” anyways. Do you think when you try to understand someone else’s crazy, you go a little bit crazy yourself?
I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling so that I can have what I like to call successful interactions with them. She can be a kind of mean you never expect. The next day it’s like it never happened. Carefully constructed tiptoes of a conversation. A witty remark. A brief moment of understanding. Offering comfort and long hugs. Feeling like I’m perhaps important through their eyes.Where are the others? No, where’s my real daughter? You’re not her Feeling perhaps I’m too important through some eyes. Stop telling me to get help. What does that even mean “help”?? I want to talk about the situation. Feeling perhaps like I should put my head on straight and look at the world and myself through my own eyes, instead of trying to imagine the people’s perspectives around me. I always always thought we’d have a good relationship. You know family is everything to me. But I can’t stay here.who’s to say I can’t stay here. I’m more reliable I can’t stay here. than anyone else? People say you just have to have faith. The greatest joy of my entire life was being a mom But do I have to? You know you’re still our mom even though we don’t live with you anymore. Is it really so great to trust in the timeline that makes you up, to trust in yourself? I guess it’s better than the alternative. How was your mom today buggy? And so I try to figure out what I really think about things. We play Kings Corner and go for walks I ramble, even if I’m saying something stupid, or maybe especially when it’s stupid. Some nights the phone or doorbell rings at 2am Forwards, backwards, left, right.Looks like mom left groceries outside the front door again People say that art imitates life. People say that life imitates art. I suppose that’s true.
- Elsa
By Elsa.
