Watching this, I feel like there’s lava in me. Like all my blood has turned to thick hot lava. I cannot imagine. I cannot imagine sitting there and having her handed to me. Finally handed to me. I cannot imagine.
But the thing is, I can.
I really can.
The lights go on. The man says, “Let’s take a break, folks! There’s cookies and coffee and juice.” Alex and I wander back to the cookies and the coffee and the juice. We’re not saying anything. I’m too hot. My blood is too hot and thick and full. I take my cookie back to my seat and work on breathing. Alex is saying nothing at all.
When the break is over, the woman with the little girl in blue overalls stands up to speak. The woman is about my age, with blond shoulder-length hair. Her daughter is balanced firmly on her hip. “Um, I’m here today to talk a little bit about my trip to China,” the woman says, her voice somewhat shaky, her hips swinging her daughter back and forth.
I listen, but I hear little of what the woman actually says. Little beyond the fact that she went to China and picked up her daughter. She may as well be talking about picking her kid up from school.
I sit there leaning into Alex, forgetting all about my maximized personal space, thinking little beyond: So here’s a mother, and here she is with her daughter.
The rest of my mind and all of my heart is transfixed by the girl. I don’t see her as a child abandoned on a street corner. I don’t see her as a child living in an orphanage who has been set free. I don’t see her as a child who has been rescued or even as a child who has rescued a mom in need of becoming a mom.
I see her, simply, as a two-year-old girl wildly in love with her mother’s hair. “Mommy’s pigtails,” she is saying, as she grabs each silky hunk and pretends to try on the style. “Mommy’s pigtails!”
It is nothing so spectacular. I suppose a lot of people could look at this picture and say, “So?”
And yet the picture is everything. It is everything in its inescapability, as is any quiet work of nature. A ladybug on a blade of grass. A tiger on a rock in the afternoon sun. A mother and her daughter. A mother who was born on one side of the Earth, and a daughter who was born on the other. How did it happen? How did they find each other? There can be no earthly answer. There can only be a divine one.
After the meeting Alex and I drive to the restaurant where we’ve planned to have our birthday dinner. Our conversation about China lasts less than a minute:
“So what do you think?” I say.
“Well, we have to do it,” he says.
“Well, we do.”
“Okay, then. Happy birthday,” he says.
“Back at ya.”
CHAPTER NINE
It’s a crisp November afternoon, and we are in Philadelphia. My mother has been in the rehab hospital for nearly two months.
And she can walk.
She called me a few days ago, said, “Want to come see me walk?” She said, “Twenty steps! I can walk twenty steps.”
The rehab hospital is beautiful, in a country-club sort of way. There are ponds with willows drooping down and arched bridges and long, perfect lawns speckled with bright autumn leaves. It’s almost too pretty. It’s almost like the designers are working too hard to cheer you up. But you can’t really argue with too pretty.
When we get inside, we don’t have to look at the directory to find my mom’s room. She’s zooming down the shiny hall in what appears to be an awfully high gear in her new electric wheelchair. “You’re here! You’re here!” she is saying, waving to us. My dad is behind her, practically jogging to keep up, his white hair flopping up and down.
She comes to an abrupt halt, throws her arms open wide. “Look at me!” she says. “Don’t I look great?”
Well, wow. She looks so … upright. I’m not used to seeing her quite this upright. She’s wearing a pretty peach top with tidy blue slacks. She’s still way too skinny, but she’s full of color, her jaw is clenched good and tight again, and her perm is back.
“Look at my eyebrows,” she says. “I got them waxed. Can you believe that? Waxed? Do you think I look like I’m in a constant state of surprise?”
“You look great,” I say, bending down for a quick kiss on her cheek. I throw a smile to my dad, who is just as I left him: calm but tired and decorated like a present with his red bow tie. He opens his arms for an embrace, and so I fall inside, comforted by his softness and musty smell.
“Well, I guess I am in a state of surprise,” my mother is saying. “Because I’m doing great. This place is great. Isn’t this place great?” She puts her hand out for Alex to hold, pulls him gently toward her. “Oh, it’s so nice of you to come. Claire and James and the kids were in yesterday. I feel like this is my Broadway debut!” Alex bends down, kisses my mom, and from behind his back brings out a box of dark chocolates from a store near his office, her favorites. “You’re such a dear,” she says to him, and then to my dad: “Two o’clock! Is it two o’clock yet, John? We are due in the gym at two o’clock.”
Okay, then. My mother has never been much for extended pleasantries. My mother is a person who is always on to the next thing. Ever since she contracted GBS, a disease that steals your ability to get on to the next thing, I’ve thought that it’s a particularly insidious one for a person like her to get. Now that she’s into the rehab phase, she is starting to process the meaning of all of this. She says the disease has taught her patience; it has forced her to flex her little-used patience muscles, oh, it has given them the workout of their lives. That’s the other thing about my mother: She can spin. She can spin misery into a lesson, tragedy into a tool for learning. She has a remarkable knack.
“Well, what does your watch say, John?” she goes on, her patience muscles apparently having already atrophied a bit. “Does it say two o’clock?”
You can tell by the look on my dad’s face that he’s way sick of the two o’clock question, that indeed it might be beginning to hurt his ears. “We have eight minutes, Claire,” he tells her. “You are now eight minutes early.”
“I think we should go get in line,” she says. “I don’t want to miss this. Not when I have an audience.”
She tucks the chocolates beside her hip, wheels her chair around, throws it into turbo. “Come on, gang.”
“She’s gotten a little overly confident with the wheelchair,” my dad tells us. “I really think they should give speeding tickets in this place.”
And so we head at a brisk pace to the gym for my mother’s two o’clock physical therapy appointment.
There are a lot of others already waiting in line. Wheelchair after wheelchair. The people, all ages, are in various stages of paralysis or weakness or without-ness. There is a little girl with no legs. A man whose entire right side has collapsed. A boy with an arm made of metal. And then my mother, with her fan club.
The thing is, we really don’t belong.
My mother is not … handicapped. I wish I had a sign that I could hold up so people would know. I want everyone in this room to understand this: My mother is not handicapped. Except, well, she is. But she’s going to get better. She is getting better. Look at her! So really, can’t we just avoid this “handicapped” stage? We are not a family that has ever had to do handicapped. We are not a walker or a wheelchair or an access-ramp family. We are normal! This is the way you have it in the back of your mind if you have never had to put it in the front.
Soon my mother’s physical therapist appears. She’s a chunky woman with frizzy hair and brilliant green eyes. She escorts my mother to a corner of the room, and we follow as my mother makes the introductions. “Robin,” she says. “I would like you to meet my daughter. She’s my baby. And this is her dear husband, Alex. He’s a psychologist. They live in Pittsburgh. Well, they did. They live on a farm now, craziest thing.… I don’t know how I ended up with the kids I ended up with.” Robin throws a glance our way, smiles, but is focused on the task at hand. She positions the walker just so in front of my mom.
“Are you ready, Claire?” she asks.
“I’m a little nervous today,” my mom says. “I don’t want to disappoint my people here. You really think I’m ready for prime time?”
Alex and my dad and I take a few steps back, trying to make ourselves invisible.
Ever so slowly, one jerky movement at a time, my mom slides herself out of the chair and toward the walker. “I’m good at scooching!” she says to us, smiling. She grabs hold of the walker, grabs it with both hands, grips.
“She has a hard time with this part,” my dad whispers to me. He’s seen this show every day now for a week.
“Okay, Claire,” Robin says, putting her hand on my mom’s back. “Just like yesterday. I want you to pull with your arms, but I want you to use your legs.
“One,” Robin says. “Two.”
My mom closes her eyes, scrunches up her face like a kid combing big knots out of her hair.
“Three!”
And with that my mother is standing. Wow! Talk about upright! It is the first time I’ve seen her stand in nearly six months. Standing! I forgot what she looked like standing. She looks like a stork. A thin bird with even thinner legs that really should not, as far as the laws of gravity dictate, be holding her up. Did she used to look like a stork? No, I don’t think so. This is my new mom.
She is looking down. She is blowing air out of her mouth.
“Shhh,” my dad whispers to me, even though I’m not talking. But he seems to want to help her, somehow.
She slides the walker a few inches forward. It has little skis on the bottom of the front feet and wheels on the back. My mom has on white Nike AirWalks, giant bulbous gym shoes intended to impress teenagers. She is looking down at those Nike AirWalks, staring at them as if she now must have a word with them. She’s concentrating. She barely lifts her right foot off the ground, moves it forward, flops it back down like it’s a thawed fish. She’s holding on to the walker so tight, her knuckles have whitened. She’s holding up most of her weight with those arms. And she slides her left foot forward.
A step. She has taken a step.
She looks up at me. It is the smallest, quickest glance. A flash. A checking. I know this look. It’s the one I would give her when I was about six, holding my nose and going under water for the first or second or third or fourth or twentieth time. It’s the longing for validation that every human being knows.
I’ve got my eyebrows raised, trying to support her with my own constant state of surprise. I’m nodding. I’ve got the look that says, “Wow!” The look every mother knows how to give and this one knows how to receive.
“Pretty good, huh?” my mom says.
“You’re doing fine, Claire,” my dad says calmly, as if to say, keep going, you’ve got quite a ways to go yet.
“Whew,” my mother says. “I have to say I think I was better at this yesterday. Do you know yesterday I made it all the way up to the blue triangle? Tell them, Robin.”
“I don’t want you to think about the blue triangle,” Robin says. “I want you to think about the next step, okay?” She’s standing behind my mom, a hand barely touching her back just above her belt.
Soon my mom has her tongue sticking out one side of her face. This is such hard work. This is so heartbreaking. This is so thrilling.
She takes her fifth step, and her sixth. They are more shuffles than steps. And yet now my mother is huffing and puffing. Ninth, tenth. Her eyes are trained on her feet. She is focused on keeping them parallel so she won’t trip. Twelfth, thirteenth. “I’m getting tired,” she says. “I’m going to need to stop soon.” She says this with effort but without embarrassment. Twenty. “That’s it,” she says. “Okay, I’m done with the torture chamber, Robin. Thank you very much.”
Robin brings her the wheelchair, and my mother eases back into it. “Yes, thank you, Robin. Thank you. That is such a pretty name, Robin. That is a name that makes people smile.” She looks up at us. “Come on, gang. They have good cookies in the cafeteria.”
With that she throws her chair into forward, spins in the direction of the sliding door, which she promptly bashes into. Thwaaaak! The door flops inward, the top falls off its tracks, that door is toppling, yes, a giant pane of Plexiglas is headed down, down, down, but then Alex and my dad rush in unison to catch it seconds before it lands on anyone’s head.
There is one beat of silence; everyone in this entire gym is frozen in time and perhaps calculating instantly what misery we have all just narrowly averted. My mother has done a 180 to assess the damage. She sees Alex and my dad holding up that door. She looks at me.
My eyebrows are up. Her eyebrows are up.
We crack up laughing.
I throw a glance at Alex, who along with my dad has cracked up, as has Robin and the man with the half-drooping body and the girl with no legs, and so on around the room.
Oh, we are having a great time. All of us. All of us who belong right here. Sometimes I think belonging is a big old game of chance. Sometimes I think we’re all just a bunch of helium balloons released into the sky. We belong wherever we find ourselves when the wind dies down.
Alex and my dad have decided to forgo the cafeteria cookies in favor of a trip to the parking lot, where they might discover what the devil is wrong with the latch on the trunk of my dad’s Buick.
My mom and I are in the cafeteria, taking in the hum of the lemonade machine. The cookies are huge. Big mushy chocolate chips.
“Now this is what I call a cookie,” I’m saying. “You weren’t kidding.”
“I think we should be outside,” my mom says. “You want to sneak out the back door with me?”
“Sneak?”
“Not really. It’s a courtyard for the patients. But it’s fun to think about escaping, isn’t it?”
“I thought you said you liked it here,” I say.
“Oh, I do,” she says. “In fact, lately I’ve been feeling like the luckiest person alive.”
Lucky? That might be a little strong. “Lucky?” I say.
She shrugs. She chews. She takes a sip from her milk carton, swallows, looks up at me.
“It was like dying,” she says. “I felt like I was dying.”
Oh?
“That’s the thing about this crazy disease, it’s like a slow death. One by one the systems go out. I experienced all of that, all of the stripping away. The humiliation.”
“I saw.”
“And now it’s like I’m being reborn, inch by inch. That’s the other thing about this disease. And let me tell you, sweetie—you’re grateful for every single inch.”
We’ve gathered our cookies, and some napkins, and our milk cartons. She’s maneuvering her way out of the cafeteria, toward the back door, and I’m following.
“Gratitude.” This, she tells me, has been the overwhelming lesson that her paralysis has taught her. “I just have this overwhelming sense of gratitude,” she says.
Lucky. Grateful. Whew. She really does have the knack. “It’s a great outlook,” I say.
“I’m thankful for every muscle in this old body,” she says. “I’m thankful for the ability to swallow, to smell, to hear. I’m thankful I can breathe. I’m thankful that I can pray.”
“I see,” I say, wishing I could. I wish I had the knack. I wish I could see the God she sees. I wish I could hear the God she hears. I wish I knew how she got where she got, with God. I wish I knew how to ask.
“So you feel like you got God back?” is how it comes out.
She doesn’t answer directly. Instead, she goes into an animated lecture about how great “you kids” were during the illness. “I mean, I knew you kids loved me, but this much?” she says. We’re outside now, parked under an oak tree. It’s chilly, but neither of us seems to mind. “The devotion,” she says. “It really amazed me. You know, if you’re in the hospital for a month or so, a friend will probably come visit. But three months? Six months? And the friends are still coming around? I had no idea I had such a faithful bunch of supporters.
”
But the attention, she says, had little to do with her winning any popularity contest. “That love was God’s love. Where do you think love comes from? It comes from God, and it comes through other people.”
I think about this. Usually I walk around thinking of love as a kind of gravity. Just one of those laws of nature, a force that has its way with you. I don’t tend to wonder where the law might have come from.
“This crazy disease has taught me so much,” my mother says.
“Patience,” I say. “You told me about the patience.”
“Yeah, but it’s so much bigger than that. It’s: I am not in charge. Of course, I always knew I wasn’t in charge. But—oh, how do I put this? I surrendered.”
“Surrendered,” I say.
“Surrender and serenity,” she says. “I never realized how close those two words are. Huh? Think about that!”
The Exact Same Moon Page 15
