Giving Back

Published in Mother’s Wisdom (Leatherwood Press, 2007)

My earliest memory: I was two years old. My mother was holding me over the kitchen sink, my stomach pressed against the edge of the countertop, her arm wrapped around me from behind, her free hand scrabbling frantically at my face. Fingernails—long, digging into my mouth. Scratching the back of my tongue, the top of my throat, trying to reach the chunk of cartilage I was choking on. The white, knobby top of a chicken leg was wedged in my airway, just beyond her reach. I tasted fright on her knuckles and cuticles and palm.

     I don’t remember what happened next, but she’s told me: I was rushed to the emergency room, but since I’d just eaten, a sedated procedure would bring a high risk of aspiration and possible death. I was able to breathe slightly past the cartilage in my throat, so the doctors decided to wait until my stomach emptied to remove the piece. My mother sat at my bedside for hours as I slept, her hand on my chest to monitor my slow, quivering breaths.

     My next-earliest memory: I was three years old, or four. I sat on her lap. She was hugging me, stroking my hair. “I love you, Kathy,” she said, “I love you so much.” I sat very still, frightened by the tears in her voice, frightened by her words: she told me that she would die for me. That if she had to choose between my life, and hers, she would choose mine. I pictured her dead, and fear gripped me tighter. Fear, and relief: she loved me that much.

     As a child I tried to return that love. I drew pictures, clumsy hearts and flowers and rainbows. “I love you,” I wrote in shaky hand at the bottom. In art class and Brownie meetings I crafted offerings of lumpy clay, yarn and glitter, heavy colored paper. I gave these on Christmas and on Mother’s Day, and on the days in between, relieved to have something to give, yet afraid I could never create something worthy of her.

     In adolescence my anxiety intensified. I watched my mother hold our struggling family together with unshakable faith and determination. I felt her loving me when I was, to anyone else, unlovable. I ate, drank, slept, and breathed her devotion, her care, her endurance. But I had nothing to offer in return. I was paralyzed by the intense self-focus of adolescence, by my need to separate myself from the person I was closest to. I couldn’t speak the emotions that welled up within me whenever I considered the vastness of her love. I was ashamed of my hardness, my smallness.   

     When I was twenty-one, my mother stood by my bed in the hospital birthing room, supporting one of my knees as I pushed. It was my first time, and hers. The air was charged with energy as both of us stood on the brink of transformation. But when the baby’s head crowned she stepped away. Birth, she felt, was a time for the parents to share alone. She took company in the hallway with my sister, hiding behind the plaid nylon veil that stretched across the doorway. I forgot her quickly, my mind lost within my body as it turned inside out. But when the baby gave her first mighty wail, I heard a bright shriek from the hallway. The OB looked at me with a wry smile. “That must be Grandma,” he said.

     I nodded and smiled. After all these years of wishing I could create a worthy gift, I had finally succeeded.