I Am Your Daughter
When your mother asks, “Who are you?” as you enter the hospital room it will dropkick the air out of your lungs all at once and cause a disassociated effect that will leave you floating above the room. You will be up there for a long while. You will never forget your mother’s face—blank, or her eyes—lost. Levitating, you will tell her that you are her daughter, and she will casually say, “Oh. I have a daughter. How nice.” You will never forget this.
Your body will eventually sink into the hard wooden chair. The wood will not comfort you. You will ask your mother how she is feeling, but you won’t put your hand on her hand, as you would have before, because to her you are a stranger. She will quip, “Oh, just ducky.” which is something that her old self would have said. This will cause confusion.
You will coax her to eat the bacon and eggs that are cold. Your mother would never have eaten cold food before. But since she doesn’t know you, perhaps you don’t know her that well, anymore, so you unwrap the plastic utensils and scoop up a bit of egg on a spoon and lift it to her mouth. She will spit it onto her chin, complaining that it is cold. This is the mother that you always knew. You offer her the plastic sealed gelatin and the apple juice, but she rejects these too, as she would have formerly.
You decide that you will not be getting comfortable in this wooden chair today and she will not be eating breakfast when she says, “Who are you again?”
“I am your daughter,” you say doggedly.
She will respond, “How interesting. You would think I would remember something like that.” This is the first time in your whole life that you haven’t had a mother. What I mean to say is that in this moment you will perceive that you don’t have a mother, even though she is lying there right in front of you.
This goes on all day, and you will insist that you are her daughter each time, and you will repeat your name too, as if that matters. But it does matter, because at last, she says, “My daughter’s name is Dawn.” You will place your hand on her hand, hoping for some wire that must have gotten jostled in all this hospital business to find a connection again, and then she will tell you about you. She will gush about how wonderful you are. She will look at you and tell you that you remind her of her daughter. She then will conclude that you should meet one another; you should become friends.
You will turn away, and you will cry,
a hard,
shoulder-heaving
cry.
You will do this without making a sound because you will not want to upset this woman. After all, she is very sick and you have come here to comfort her. She will continue to rattle on about her daughter. You will begin to wonder if she has talked about you to others like this, and you will find it embarrassing. You will hear the nurses laughing distantly in the hall and tears will be coming out of your eyes, as well as your nose. It’s like that time you saw a silent disco, people dancing wildly without sound at the local park. You are crying uncontrollably without sound, but you surmise it is not nearly as much fun. You look at this woman, your face wet with tears and snot and your eyes puffy, but she doesn’t notice. Your mother would have noticed, but this woman does not.
When it’s finally time to leave you will feel gutted. You will drive to her new house, the one she forgot she bought, and sleep in her bed, that she never slept in. She slept in a recliner instead, before graduating to a hospital bed in the living room. You fixate on the photos in her room. There is one of her as a baby and one when she was in high school. You realize that she wasn’t your mother yet in either of those photos, and somehow, she isn’t your mother now.
When morning comes you will press snooze. You’ll lay in bed way past the time that you would ordinarily allow yourself. You will realize that the room is a room that she never used either, but it is still called your mother’s room, and it has her things in it. There are clothes in her closet that she hasn’t worn in years, because she has been relegated to gowns that tie in the back because they are much easier to remove when she needs cleaned.
On the way to the hospital, you get coffee from the drive thru, but drink it in the parking lot, with the engine idling. You will prepare yourself to visit the woman who does not know you anymore. You realize that when a mother forgets that you are her daughter, then she also becomes someone who is no longer your mother and you don’t know her that well either.
You will walk into this woman’s room. Her eyes will open. You will sit in the wooden chair that didn’t comfort you all day yesterday. She will stare at you, and you will stare at her. You will see your face in her face. “Do you know who I am?” you will ask, even though you have read that you are never supposed to ask this question.
Her brow will furrow and she will say, a bit sternly, as if you are a child again, “Of course. You are my daughter Dawn. Why would you ask a question like that?”
feature image of brush and leaves by Victoria Druc
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