To My Mom, Whose Life Changed as Much As Mine From My Ill Health

There are no pictures of my mother and me up on the walls of our house. The truth is, my father’s life and death can be condensed into a story in my mind, but my mother’s presence and influence in my life is much more complicated.

My mother is a poetic intellectual who believes in choices and who has supported me endlessly through, oftentimes, seemingly strange decisions. To give an example, some years ago I asked to go back to university in the U.K. newly blind, living alone in a new house and on monthly chemotherapy pulses. My mother did not even blink. She flew with me to the U.K. and left me crying and petrified on a train platform, unsure I even knew how to get home. She must have been terrified when she got on that train. I knew that then, too, but now as a parent myself I get chills even thinking about it. But she respected my choice and loved me enough to allow me the freedom of it.

By the end of that year I was confident and knowledgeable enough to be able to take a train and boat by myself and cross Europe, blind and on chemo. The following year I couldn’t walk and was in a wheelchair. She drove me, a cane, a wheelchair and my dog single-handedly through Europe to take me back to my house in the UK. Then she drove back home.

Five years ago I confessed to her I wouldn’t be able to live by myself anymore, that my medical reality was such that I needed help to live a semi-independent life. In response, she packed up all her things, a lifetime of things, left the only country she’s ever known and all her friends and life, and moved across the continent so I could have a shot at the life I chose.

The day I found out I was pregnant with my daughter Dot, my mother was in the house with me. When the test turned positive I screamed for her, frozen about all the unknowns and risks a pregnancy would bring. She was outside the room with a good friend of ours when I was giving birth, through those five days and nights that went so very wrong. She was next to me in the operating room and while I hemorrhaged, my blood pressure crashed and doctors were panicking, she was the first person to hold my daughter. In that operating room, when the doctor handed Dot to her, she sang a lullaby while she held her so the first sound in Dot’s life would be joyous.

I can never undo the deep sorrow she feels for my medical situation and for Dot’s. The only thing I can do is try as hard as I can to honor her, her love and her sacrifice. And love her. And learn from her and the complexities of her character and spirit.

So today and every day, I am so deeply grateful for my mother’s presence and example in my life.

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