Mom was in the ICU for three weeks. The doctor suggested moving her to hospice.
All tagged daughter
Mom was in the ICU for three weeks. The doctor suggested moving her to hospice.
Resetting the antique clock was an occasion—my mother stood behind me, coaching.
It is an unsaved number but I answer, leaning back as the preliminary recording begins.
I was drowning. Or so I thought. My head kept bobbing under and I was taking in gulps of lake water again and again.
“It’s important to be calm and quiet because we don’t know how these dogs will react to children,” I remind my six-year-old in the parking lot of the animal shelter.
Little fingertips prod my eyelids, scouting before the assault.
“I’ve brought you some red roses from my garden, Mum.” “I don’t want those. They symbolise death,” she retorted, grumpy as ever.
She came out crying, holding her right arm. To my untrained eye, nothing seemed broken.
Mum and I are arguing about cosmetics again, about her tendency to hoard and let rot.
Guests whisper and I hear. “She’s in shock.” “Foreigners don’t cry.” “Immigrants lose their roots.”
The first bite I inhale, the second I gobble, the third I gulp past a hiccup. She frowns, but she's holding her breath too, swallowing the morsel stuck in her own throat.
I knew that I was destined to fail my daughter in some profound way, so when she turned away from my nipple, stiffening in my arms, her soft lips tightly pursed, I was not surprised.
Mom found it doing laundry. My lungs seized watching her pull the evidence from my pocket.
My Mum is getting shorter so I pull it down and look up “red-backed shrike” in the index. On page 42 there is a delicate watercolour of a grey-blue and brown male, sharp beak, vicious reputation.
“I sold another book.” Mom had persuaded another person to buy my novel.
Tripping over her tongue tumor, my mom croaks out a few words. “You fold socks the right way, Emily,” she manages.
The first time she left she walked out into the night without a coat, but returned within a few hours and it was as if it had never happened. The next time, months later, was as abrupt, but this time she took me with her.
I approach an employee. “I lost my gloves.” She looks into my eyes, must see a strange importance.
The A-Go-Go, a huge air hangar in the Dennis woods, has a dance Saturday and unbelievably, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs are playing. My parents checked out the grounds once and saw a pair of underpants. Crime site.
My daughter’s visit softened sterile surfaces of my home with a trail of mugs, plates, and debris, comforting signs of her presence. Our sympathetic bond assuaged my longing for connection, accumulated over months of pandemic isolation.