Note: This is a piece written in three parts in response to my mother’s near-fatal car accident in November 2024. It is my honesty as bare as it can be and while I had trepidation posting this piece, I am trying not to be ruled by my fear that she’ll have a damaged reputation after posting it. I’m tired of being responsible for holding the truth of how me and my siblings grew up. I guess I hope leaving it here makes some of the exhaustion go away.
11/14/2024 – Written at my mother’s hospital bedside
What does it say about how I grew up that all three of my mother’s children have been subconsciously preparing to get a phone call from a stranger saying she’s died in an accident she caused?
How do I describe—even a little—the fear that bolted through me when I heard the woman who stopped to help say they could hear the sirens?
Sometimes I am so tired of being my mother’s mother. My mother’s main source of any kind of human contact. It is excruciating to be the one fielding calls and asking questions of people in medical attire. Telling well-wishers, “thank you for stopping by” when I want to tell them to leave because she won’t shut up until they do and she has a broken sternum.
I want her to lie still and be quiet for once. Let silence help her heal, but I think the quiet terrifies her. She needs sound so she isn’t alone.
She’s lying down as much as she can and I see her pulse in the thin skin of her neck. Her eyes are closed and every now and then her nostrils flare as some kind of pain passes over her, and she fights back tears.
This woman gave me life and I am livid she is so careless with hers.
Birds have hollow bones. I remember thinking when I was a kid that was impossible because bones are full of marrow and such a vital part of being complete. Structure and stability in a consistency not seen in my life otherwise.
My mother keeps thanking me and my sister for being here. She’s telling everyone I told my boss I wouldn’t be in the rest of the week, but really I told her it was just today.
Is this a glimpse of what it’ll be like in ten years when I’m the closest and the time comes for real? Am I selfish for being angry my life has to be halted so I can help her restructure hers?
She broke her back.
She broke her sternum.
Her seatbelt cut slices into her hips and she has bruises purpling her stomach. She can’t walk because her left foot is twice the size it usually is. Her right hand has a gash across her knuckles and it has yet to be stitched up.
She had a morbid sense of pride when she announced there was a puddle of blood that morning from where the staples held her skin together.
Do birds have skin on their wings? Or is it just feathers? I bet they have skin. They have to, right? Follicles for the feathers to protrude and spines to remain.
She’s eating her sandwich and talking again. She slept for about twenty minutes. There is an emptiness in my whole body and my anger is rearing.
We are so fragile and easily shattered.
My mother is enjoying being taken care of, which everyone eventually does, but watching her direct my sister and talk to the nurses opens up a part of me I thought healed.
Am I a bad daughter for being so bitter?
I want to weep.
I want to go home.
I want to stop feeling so angry.
How do birds know where to go? How do they know the movement of their wings will beat enough to lift them into the air? Do they tuck their feet automatically? Press their tiny talons into the softness of their feathers as they soar?
Her hand is bleeding again. She’s making jokes. We briefly talked of the events last night, and I want her to feel guilty. Feel even a twitch of remorse for never listening when we tell her to pay attention while driving.
Does this make me horrible? Does this mean I’m not a good kid?
I hate myself in a way I didn’t know I could.
My brother says he thinks I’m just tired.
I’m about to combust.
The After
I haven’t spoken to my mother since Thanksgiving. She messaged me for Christmas, and I didn’t respond. How can I be so callous to a woman who just had a serious, almost fatal car accident?
Because she smiled when we told her we were afraid.
It was a micro expression she’d deny ever making, but I’ve seen it my whole life. A flash of satisfaction that she’s somehow won.
I can still hear the way she tried to breathe when she called me that night. The way her voice sucked at the air she couldn’t catch.
She told my cousin I wigged out because a stranger called me to tell me what happened. She laughed when she said it.
I wake up reaching for my phone thinking it’s ringing and it’s that woman again. She was so frustrated with me because I didn’t know what to do. I think her name was Nicole. I wish I could find out how to thank her for stopping.
And apologize to her because I thought my mom was dying and I wasn’t ready for it.
The ER people were very kind to me when I walked in. I know I looked terrified. My hands were shaking, and I had them stuffed in my pockets. A chaplain brought me back to a less crowded waiting area, and told me what they were doing for my mom.
I couldn’t sit. Had she fallen asleep at the wheel like she has countless other times? Why was that my first thought? The chaplain returned and asked me if I wanted water. I laughed and said no, thanks, because I laugh when I’m scared.
The fear isn’t so big, then.
My stepmom returned my panicked call and asked me if I wanted her to come to the hospital and sit with me. I couldn’t speak, so she answered for me and said she was on her way.
The manager came by and told me they were doing some x-rays and other tests. The chaplain returned and gave me a smile. He was a beautiful young man, and I think I fell in love with him for that night because of his kindness. Everyone kept asking if I wanted to go see my mom, but I said I was waiting for my sister to get there.
If my mom was dying, I couldn’t do it by myself.
My sister arrived and we went to see my mom. I cannot put into words how dead she looked. Her eyes opened and she smiled, and said some random things because she was on heavy painkillers.
The towels they’d used to soak up her blood were on the floor. Her hand was covered in a bandage drenched with iodine, and the gown she wore was spotted with pinkish brown.
I have seen the inside of my mother’s skin. I have seen the way her layers were shorn apart by her seatbelt and I see it when I close my eyes.
I condensed my brain into a speck so I could fix her life.
I texted her piano students, called her insurance company, called her physical therapy, called so many places. I spoke to the men from her church because she wanted a blessing.
People visited her daily. She told the story in the same inflection to everyone who would listen.
“There were no lights! I would have slowed down if there had been lights!”
She hit the other driver’s trailer full of wood at 55 mph. There is no more front end to her car. I went to the tow yard to take pictures for her insurance company.
The insurance company she’d been with for a week.
The tow yard wouldn’t move her car from where they’d parked it, so I bruised my arms and legs getting into it, sandwiched between two (far less damaged) vehicles. I knelt on the rain-soaked, bloodstained seats trying to recover the items she wanted. I cut my fingers on the glass blown across those seats like sand.
It was when she smiled at my fear, I understood: I would never be what I wanted to be for my mother. It wasn’t the decades of mental, emotional, and sometimes physical abuse. She didn’t hit me all the time, so it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t when she told me with the strongest conviction that the church she belongs to was more important to her than her children. It wasn’t even when she closed my arm in the car window when I was trying to breathe during a panic attack because she was swerving while driving.
It was her satisfaction that she owned my terror. I was afraid for her.
She is a master at manipulation. She is so good at making you feel like you’re worthless, that you don’t even know she’s the one doing it. I have cried in the deepest depths of my depression in her lap. I have asked her to make it stop hurting because I don’t want to leave, I want to stay and figure it out. She drank it in like my pain sustained her and she could use it when I didn’t do what she wanted.
She threw my demons at me when I wouldn’t help her immediately. “I’ve done this for you. You can’t help me with one small thing?”
Deflated.
Ransacked.
Gutted.
I never wanted to be better than her. It wasn’t about seeking her approval, but being enough as I am. Being allowed to stop reaching for some bar she’s tossed to the highest peak and laughs as she kicks my feet out from under me.
I want to ask her how she ever got joy out of owning a broken thing. If seeing me wither whenever I gave in to whatever she demanded of me when I was already stretched to impossible limits was really that big of a high.
I remember thinking when I was younger how birds are stupid things. Their tiny brains and their flappy wings. The Canadian geese that pooped everywhere were just taking up space. Terrorizing small children.
I was a bird.
I read about Icarus. How he flew too close to the sun and plummeted to the ocean. He was stupid, too. Be happy with what you have, I thought. What you have is what you deserve.
But what if Icarus laughed as he fell? I read somewhere that maybe he did, and I haven’t been able to see birds the same since. Why would a boy who could fly choose to stay on the ground when the sky is infinite?
I am a bird.
The Now
The psychological torment I went through as a child is why I will never fully trust another person. If my own mother derived joy from torturing and owning her children, how can I look at anyone else and believe they won’t do the same? I tell people, “you are valued because of who you are, not because what you give me.”
And I believe that with the entirety of my being.
There are some who have taken advantage of my desire to make sure no one else feels the way I do. Some who have used my emptiness of self to try and add me to their collection of misery. But I refuse to let myself be lost forever.
I accept that there are moments of uncertainty, that there are times where I cry over my sink as I wash my dishes because I miss my mom. I will not tell myself I’m dumb for crying. I will not tell myself I’m fine, when I am very much the opposite.
There is so much I wish I could be angry about in regard to my childhood. It’s not anger I feel, though. It’s sadness. It’s grief for the kid I never got to be. Sure, I had moments of being a kid, but it was always tempered with “what’s going to happen when I get home? What kind of mood is Mom in today? What have I done to upset her? I can fix it, whatever it is.”
Ten-year-olds are not meant to fix their damaged mothers. I forgive the parts of her that are broken, but I do not forget the way she used those to destroy me.
salisbury.fake 