“But…I don’t want you to leave,” she says. Her words were not disturbing, it was the tone of her voice and the frantic, erratic look in her clear glassy blue eyes. Her eyes, azure, layered with bags underneath them, so distinct and elevated from her face that they looked like puddy.
“Mom,” I said. “I promise, I’ll be back. I just have to go back to school, to work.”
Her eyes grew ever more round, her lips downturned, a permanent frown etched into her mouth. I saw her upper body posture stiffen, revealing her fear, her countenance ripe with anxiety and wreaking with the despair she had experienced all throughout her life, with the most recent trauma of my father’s suicide.
“You’ve been… my right hand,” she says softly, almost inaudibly.
I know this. She is right. I have.
Caring for my middle-aged mother over the last few months as though she is my own child or a crippling senior citizen, incapacitated, dependent.
My mother, the rock and foundation of my life, my best friend and confidant and wise advisor, the one I always relied on to carry me through the volatile dysfunctional home base is gone, as departed as my father.
Now she appears like a scared child who does not want to be left behind on the first day in kindergarten.
The heartache of seeing her so helpless, so infantile, is only dulled by prickles of rage that I feel at my father for his choice to exit, for his bloody, grotesque self-inflicted demise. That he left her, gave her one more reason to experience trauma, abandonment, making our relationship all the more likely to surge into the throes of co-dependency. …Why I am unable to live independently two states away because her twin tower of dysfunction has gone, leaving her world decimated. She is standing amidst the crumbled ruins, after 48 years of devotion and loyalty.
The rage and frustration that I swallow, that dwells and swells up within my heart is because though I love my mother and I am heartbroken seeing her helplessness, I also cannot swallow the bitter pill that I should not have to shoulder the guilt of being who I am—a functional adult, the woman she raised me to be—someone who moved away, pursued higher education, moved abroad. Now all I want is to finish my doctoral program, my dissertation, get a professor position.
I gather my things. I turn to her, I wrap my arms around her; my mother the adamantly non-hugger in our family, allows me to enfold her in an embrace. She relaxes, and strangely, against her nature, stiffens not when I hug her, but when I move away.
I keep my hand on hers for a few moments longer. Her eyes still look intense, more scared than I have ever seen. But she drops her gaze, aware that I am still going to leave, that I have to.
“I promise I’ll be back as soon as I can Mom, and I’ll call on the road and when I get there,” pledging my allegiance to our regular habits in our co-dependent relationship.
She looks at me longingly as I pull out from my uncle’s driveway. I watch her as I pull away. Her head is one hand, a smoking cigarette in another. Her posture looking as though her skeleton, her frame, is about to collapse in on itself.
I feel a tightness. A knot.
Because I know she is my responsibility now. As I begin the four hour drive back to Ohio, I feel keenly both the part of me that remains there, beside her, my chain smoking, Pepsi guzzling mama. And also the part of me that is devastated, sensing this hole that I cannot save her from, the dysfunction of past, her trauma and the family’s dysfunction, the way that she saved me from mine.