1 post tagged “mother's day”

Show us what Mother's Day means.

I can.

"Feel better now that you've got a heart, tin man?"

On October twelfth, 2003, my family was doing something called the Walk For Hope.  It was part of a cancer research benefit.  Many of the women in my family and many women we are friends with have been afflicted with some form of cancer.  This included my mother, who was just coming up to her fifth-year anniversary of recovery from a malignant melanoma.  She'd had interferon therapy for it after it was removed and for a while things were hellish, but we were all so excited that she was well enough to go on vacations and do things like cancer walks.

Those months were bad, though.  At the end of the summer, I'd fallen victim to a disease of my own, something horrible that we girls call a "crush".  Crushes are monstrous afflictions to be fled from like vengeful beasts; mine had mutated into some twisted form of love for the subject, and things had gone well for a while, till I'd felt brave enough to show my true self, at which point he'd revealed to me that I was really just a bit of fun for him and then taken off to the north lands of ice and snow.

Feeling unlovable is vicious, and, unable to see my way out of my own suffering, I acted horribly to everyone around me, including my mother--especially her; she, being more versed in the virtue of wisdom than I, already saw that this man had been cruel and undeserving of my love and I shouldn't mourn his loss.  But, being nineteen and stupid, I didn't want to hear any of that, and we fought as a ferret corsair might attack a Badger Lady.  My mother, whose Bloodwrath might rival that of Lady Cregga Rose Eyes, was quite the formidable opponent, and yet I stubbornly continued to resist any and all efforts on her part to console me or teach me the lesson I was supposed to be learning from my pain.

On October eleventh, 2003, things finally came to a boiling point and we had it out over the kitchen table, our hands working furiously the whole time as we made the armbands shown above--all the walkers in our family would wear them the next day.  The pink squares bore the names of cancer survivors while the red bore names of those we'd lost.  Mama was having a tough time getting the felt hearts to be the shape she wanted; I was burning my paws on the glue gun.  We fought, and we wept, and finally, we came to some kind of understanding that we were different warriors, and handled things differently, and felt things differently, but the lack of understanding between us didn't mean that we didn't love each other just as fiercely as we fought.

When it was over, I sat at the kitchen table, paws stinging from hot glue, head spinning from tears and the scent of it all, thoroughly exhausted, paws still working, still moving, still creating.

Mama, that great Badger Lady, who knew Wisdom long before I, took a piece of Scotch tape, twisted it into a circle, and stuck it to one of the felt hearts she'd discarded earlier.  Pressing the heart to my breast, she smiled through her tears and said, "Feel better now that you've got a heart, tin man?"

I touched the heart, the realization that something very important had just happened filling me, even if the meaning was yet unclear.

Thanksgiving weekend, roughly a month and a half later that season, was the last time she went out, really out--we took our annual trip to Vermont, and she ate a steak dinner which would end up being the last full meal she'd manage.  The first week of December would see her in bed, telling me that it was just going to be "another bad year", and me stamping my footpaw and saying that I didn't want another bad year, didn't want another bad anything.  I was the only kitt in the house when the ambulance came for her a week later, the knowledge that this time was different already apparent to me.  I was the only kitt in the hospital room when the doctor told us that she'd elected not to have any more chemotherapy and that they would make her as comfortable as they could, twenty adults in the room but he spoke and looked only at me.  I thought her very brave to refuse treatement; I felt that she was taking her death and owning it as only a great warrior would. 

On December twenty-third, 2003, someone finally talked me into going downstairs to the cafetera and get a sandwich, you look haggard.  I was at the counter, ordering grilled cheese, when someone tapped me on the shoulder.  "Excuse me, I'm not quite fi--" I said, turning, and it was my uncle, and I nodded, feeling mildly shocked by the fact that the first minute I stepped away would be the minute, but I realized later it was the right way for it to have gone.

I write this not out of sensationalism.  I write this not to garner sympathy from faceless internet masses.  I write this out of honor and reverence for the greatest warrior I ever knew, who trained me well in the short time I spent under her tutelage.  The Great Badger Lady, the Mama Wolf, who deserves to be on the sunniest shore in the sunniest season.

Fourteen seasons and three hundred twenty-five miles later, the armband remains wrapped around the arm of my bookcase, and the felt heart is pierced with a safety pin and affixed to my corkboard.  I will not forget.

Sleep softly on, Beloved One,
Take with you all our dreams,
To rest in noontide valleys,
Beside old silent streams.

(Lady Cregga Rose Eyes' epitaph, Jacques' "Taggerung")