When I was a little girl, I would try to stay up as late as I could to see my mother when she got home. I’d bounce around on our couch as my father drifted to sleep in front of Law & Order after dinner. I’d flip through a book, roll around on my bedroom floor and fiddle with my clock radio—but not too loudly—I needed to wait for the sound of the garage door opening. The faint metallic screeching of those doors was my cue.
“Mommy!” I would announce theatrically, rushing to her side.
“Hello, hello sweetie!” she’d say, juggling a briefcase, a lumpy purse and shuffling a clunky cellphone away from her ear and into the silken pocket of her mink coat.
A cloud of perfumed air followed her through the door. She smelled musty and sweet, a mix of old fur coat and baby lotion. She swore by it as the best way for a smooth shave. On weekends, I would watch her intently as I sat cross-legged on the bathroom floor, carefully sliding the blade up and down her pale, sturdy calves. I thought she had mastered what seemed like the tedium of womanhood to me at eight years old, which involved so much plucking and blow-drying.
When my mother got home from work, I’d nestle under this chocolaty brown coat that draped to her ankles and clasp my arms around her waist. I’d hide in this warm nest, my mother laughing at me trying to mimic her high-heeled strides around the house as she deposited her things. She never grew angry at my parasitic latching onto her tired body. I breathed her in all that I could in the brief moments I had her to myself. Eventually my father would bellow at her to and come eat dinner on the couch with him, and to stop fussing with me, god damnit.
I was in awe of her power suits and elegant pearl necklaces. Rising at dawn and returning at close to midnight. Working in an office with a floor-to-ceiling window and her own secretary. She was Wonder Woman with shoulder pads and a halo of curly, red hair.
At one point my sister told her kindergarten class that she worked in a toy factory. The reality was a bit less glamorous, as she worked in economic development in one of New Jersey’s many poor urban centers. But she was always showing up, guiltily, with an armful of Barbies when she came home particularly late many nights in a row. We had a hideously growing doll pile of teased blonde hair, tanned legs and pink plastic stilettos in our basement by the time I was ten.
But, after a long day at school, I was just excited to be tucked into bed at night. She would kiss my forehead, wrap me tightly in blankets and coo to me, “You can do anything you want to. You’re so smart and so pretty and I’ll always love you.”
…
By the time I was ready to graduate high school, I didn’t believe that I was smart or pretty, but I wasn’t going to let anything stop me from doing what I wanted to do, which was mainly leave. I couldn’t stop dreaming about going to college. Wherever I ended up, I imagined I would live in an incredible world of opportunity, worlds away from the boring uniformity of suburban New Jersey.
And I wouldn’t have to live in my house. I wouldn’t be around when my father wanted to throw a chair or punch a hole through doors when I didn’t fold laundry the right way. I couldn’t be blamed for the threat of divorce in the air, constantly being told I was the impetus for my parents' vicious fighting as a soundtrack to falling asleep nearly every night.
I could be a different person’s daughter. A different person entirely.
I grew further detached from my reality. The cruel words of my father and a depressingly bleak high school where my nerdy awkwardness continued to leave me out. I told myself I was going places, and so did my mother.
But I didn’t seem listen to her much anymore. She’d shuffle through the doorway at the end of the day, and I’d toss a curt “Hey” her way and creep up to my room to listen to a moody record or draw. I’d hole up with only the low light of my desk lamp to brighten the room. I could hear her slow steps up the stairs from the creaking of our old wooden boards and knew she was heading for my door.
Knock knock knock.
“Hi sweetie…How are you? Are you okay?”
“Fine, I’m whatever,” I’d reply, a nightmarish stereotype of a teenager.
“Okay…Well, I’ll be downstairs with your dad, if you’d like to come down.”
“Of course you’ll be.”
Why aren’t you ever home, I’d think. Don’t you know how hard it is here?
She always spoke to me with a soft, sweet voice. Maybe she did know, but didn’t think she could do anything about it. It was like she was trying to coax the attentive little girl she once had out from a hardened shell and a band tee shirt. It’s funny how, when you want someone’s attention so badly, that violently pushing them away seems like the best way to deny it.
Puffy crescents had begun to form under her pale green eyes. She was having a harder time waking up at 5 a.m. and seeing the road at night on the long drive home. She fought against my father’s criticisms and bellowing less, and took to awkwardly laughing at his affronts instead.
My mother was doing the unfathomable. She was getting older and tired, and it shames me to admit that I resented her for it. I wasn’t ready to accept it. I felt I needed more mothering. I saw it as even more abandonment after years of being consumed by her work.
…
Eventually, I was on winter break of my senior year of high school. I couldn’t sleep properly for days. I was waiting to hear back from the best and farthest away school I applied to: Northwestern University.
I checked my email incessantly. That’s where the school notified you first. One night I came home from a friend’s house. It was where I spent most of my weekends, being shuttled around in other friends' cars, staying out too late and letting the missed calls from my worried mother pile up on my voicemail.
But when I got inside the house she merely urged me to go check my email to see if I’d been accepted.
“Go, go!” she said, smiling at me, her eyes looking almost on the verge of tears. Even she doesn’t think I made it, I thought. This idea plagued me even more than not getting accepted.
There was an email from Northwestern University in my inbox. The subject line said “Congratulations!”
My stomach dropped, my hands were shaking. I almost closed my eyes upon clicking it, as if I I’d re-open them and the message would change. I imagined this is what it felt like to win the lottery, tingling with delightful shock at the thought of not having to worry about anything ever again.
“I got in,” I nearly whispered to myself. Then I shouted it, leaping out of my computer chair, my mother pulling me in tightly and kissing cheeks that already hurt from being paralyzed in a large grin.
“Ah, I knew you would sweetie! Congratulations, congratulations,” she said the last word over and over again, trailing off, my permanent cheerleader.
After sharing the news with my father and my sister, who was home from her freshman year of college for the holidays, the family hung around for what seemed like longer than usual. Nobody was retreating to their separate corners of the household, as was typical in the early evening. I was supposed to be padding barefoot around the house in a nervously excited state as I rattled off the news to my friends over the phone.
But instead everyone stayed in our den, and my mother told me take a seat on the couch. She stayed standing, and my sister sat next to me with her hands folded in her lap. No one would look at me. It was like everyone retreated to separate corners of the house in spirit. My father took his usual place at the front of the couch, his feet even propped up on an ottoman. I didn’t think it could be that serious. I had a fleeting thought of being in trouble for recently denting the old Subaru my sister and I shared.
My mother did all of the talking.
She felt some lumps in her left breast last month. She’d gotten a mammogram. They found some questionable spots. They tested them with a long needle. They were cancerous. They kept finding more and more, a dangerous fibrous network of cancer scattered throughout her breast. It was aggressive. It was stage zero, the earliest point at which you can identify breast cancer. But it was aggressive.
I didn’t ask any questions. Each new piece of information was like a knife sliding deeper and deeper into my stomach. I felt dizzy from the nausea. Suddenly the evening appeared to be a string of improbability. I questioned whether or not I was asleep. I wasn’t.
I knew because I began to cry so violently that it felt like my body was a sinking ship, flooding with too much water for it to survive by merely squeezing it out drop by drop from my eyes. I was sobbing loudly. Everyone was silent. It heightened how childish I felt, blatantly letting my fear pour down my face. At seventeen, I was too consumed by an overwhelming sense of immediate grief to console the real victim in the room, my mother, faced with a fast-spreading poison from within her own body, her own breast.
All I could manage to say or think was, “Are you dying?” Really, Are you leaving me?
My mother explained it all calmly. I assumed she was intoning the vague and clinical voices of various doctors she’d recently seen, apparently without any of my knowledge. She would be okay, and right now they were considering just a lumpectomy to remove the problem areas, but will continue to do more tests, she said.
I was overcome with guilt. How did I not know? Why does everyone else know? Then anger overtook me, as if my knowledge of the cancer’s presence would scare it out of my mother’s breast.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I implored her, looking around to see the information came as no shock to my father and sister. How long had everyone been sitting on this information as we went about our business, bickering, gobbling up Chinese food on Friday nights? My business. The business of ignoring my family, ignoring my mother. The one person who never said an unkind word to me in my entire life, even as the years flitted by and I said so many that I regret to her.
She said that she wanted to wait for a balanced moment. If I got into Northwestern, she would tell me her diagnosis. Good news to balance out the bad. It was very Zen of her. She’d taken to hanging wind chimes around the kitchen, dining room and throughout the trees of our front yard and placing large stones up the brick stairs to our front door in years before. In retrospect, I guess it wasn’t a shocking approach in accordance with her style and philosophy. It amazed me that in the most terrifying time of her adult life, her first thoughts went to her children. How she could tell me, in the least painful way she knew how. Though often absent from my home life, I’d forgotten that in her core she was, and had always been, my mother.
…
Of course, being accepted into Northwestern was no consolation at all. In fact, I didn’t think it mattered much anymore. How could I live with being a plane ride away from home as my mother was potentially on her deathbed? The thought disgusted me. I hated myself for having desperately wished to leave home and for not appreciating the mother I had. She refused to even let me consider not going. She simply chuckled to herself when I suggested it. Her dreams for me became bigger than my own. She told me we’d take it one day at a time, as we had to. Together.
And we did, through the spring and summer. Through the double mastectomy that followed upon more saddening test results of the vigorous strain she’d developed. The chemotherapy and radiation meant to fry any hint of cancer that could spread through her bloodstream from her bosom. Through her achy bones and vomiting. And the tufts of beautiful, auburn curls loosening from her scalp and coating the bathroom floor. Through her weeping in the shower at her flattened chest marked with swollen scars where full breasts used to be.
Wig and headscarf shopping came to replace our typical mall outings to satisfy my mother’s obsession with buying her favorite fancy mascara. She didn’t need it anymore: her eyelashes had also fallen out.
My mother continued commuting up north to work tediously long hours. She even continued mothering me, though our roles appeared to slightly reverse.
“You’re still so beautiful, Mom, and I’m so proud of you,” I’d need to reassure her after she wearily tried to arrange a headscarf and struggling, or worrying about the fit of her shirts without a womanly curve.
It was the least I could do. I was going away to college that fall, but I was already starting my new life back home. I was slowly becoming a different person, a better person. I was learning how to care more about someone else than myself, to grow up, to be a person more like my mother.