On or about July 12, 2009 I started a countdown to my 50th Birthday thinking perhaps becoming a half a century old would provide me with material, motivation and a clear finish line I could cross instead of the imaginary ones I easily create and destroy when I fail to cross over them. I will fulfill. I just never knew what dream I was supposed to be fulfilling. Should I become a teacher, a writer, a mother, a comedienne? Hell, I do all those things in my daily life. I simply don’t do them for money or recognition. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? One of the world’s greatest puzzles from my youth and I still have not figured it out. Is the silence killing my soul? Do I need applause, an audience, a pay check validating that what I am doing has some monetary value? Is “monetary” the only thing of which I consider a true measure reflecting the value of an act, an idea, a product? I want to write a book of questions because that is all I seem to have these days. No one has the answers and if they do they are hiding them in the trees in a forest far away where the trees fall over and no one is listening to them.
How many more days will I have with my mother? How many more days will my mother have here on this earth? How many more memories will fade from the light in her eyes? How many small smiles are left as she grabs for those memories disintegrating in the depths of her mind. "I don't want to lose my mind." She repeated this over and over again during the last several decades as the arthritis ate her bones and the diabetes choked her arteries. She sleeps in a wheel chair and she use to look at old people sleeping in wheel chairs and say, "oy, that is so sad, at least I still have my mind." Now I watch her sleeping, her head falling back and the small oxygen lines wrapped around her face and tucked behind her ears and I want to pour my soul into her to wake her up and say, "you are still here Becky, with me, wake up, call me a name, boss me around some more." I am not use to her being so frail. This mountain of woman who made me. I am but a cave at the bottom, empty and dark.
I lean my head over and wait for her to gently stroke my hair. I have never been affectionate with her even though she wanted me to be. I needed space, physical space of my own because she had always taken up so much of my emotional space. Now,she is content to simply sleep in her wheel chair. My emotions are all for me. The air is escaping and I am trying to compensate by eliminating the physical space between us. I hold her crooked, black blue hand. She is so bruised all over. It is as if all the pain she always talked about from her wretched childhood and horrible marriage is surfacing. She can no longer hide it behind the sparkling personality that once commanded everyone's attention at Bingo or while playing Kaluki. Her personality is slowly sinking deep into the darkness with the memories. How much longer? What am I counting down to now?
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