[OT] Sunday Free Write - Mothers Day Edition

I love my mom. I didn't have the best childhood, and I resented my mom for a lot of it. We're on better terms now. I wrote this and it's based in an actual event from my childhood.


When I was eleven I wrote down my cause of death on a piece of paper and handed it to my mother over the dinner table.

“This is how I will die,” I stated, matter-of-factly.

“I see,” my mother said. Her voice had a lilt of confusion, an elongation of the vowel that she reserved for the moments when life truly brought her a situation she didn’t know how to respond to. She took the paper from me and looked down at my blockish handwriting. I had written my cause of death twice: once in print and once in cursive, because we were learning it in school and I wanted all the practice I could get. Plus I loved looping my letters, and ys were hard to come by.

“How do you know what hypothermia is?” my mother wondered more than asked.

“My book,” I said.

“Oh. Your book,” she said with a hint of something else in her voice. My mother hated my book. It was something that my Dad had bought me from a book fair. A Brief History of the World’s Worst Disasters. Eleven-year-old me read it like a bible, keeping it close to her bed so that she could have it at a moment's notice, stuck cycling between reading about epidemics, natural disasters, and acts of terrorism; waking up crying from their pursuant nightmares. If my mother tried to take it from me I would scream and cry, reverting to early-childhood tantrums that mixed with my newfound ability to make hurtful sentences.

My mother pursed her lips. In the six months since I’d started reading the book so closely I had convinced myself that I had ebola, refused to eat beef, and devolved into a panicked mess on an airplane. She looked down at the paper again and then set it to the side of her plate distastefully.

She sat with it for a few minutes before she asked the question I had carefully prepared and waited for. “Why?”

“Because you’re supposed to feel happy at the end,” I chimed in before she had even finished asking. “At the end. You get really happy and feel warm, and then you go to sleep.”

“But what about before that?” she asked. “There’s a lot of suffering. It can take hours.”

“I want to die happy,” I said. “I want to be warm.”

My mother stood and came to my side of the table. She said nothing but her customary, “Oh, sweetheart,” before she swept me into her arms and buried her face in my hair. She smelled like the hospital. Sterile. Foreign. She didn’t cry, but I knew she wanted to. She cried all the time.

That night, after I was supposed to be asleep, I sat outside my mother’s door for the sixth night in a row and listened to her talk on the phone. She only ever talked about two things: me and Mark, her new boyfriend who I hated.

After a long and lengthy discussion of Mark and work, I finally came up in conversation. The clock in the kitchen blinked that it was past eleven, and I was having trouble with my eyelids drooping.

“I know I shouldn’t be worried,” she said. Sometimes it was hard to hear what she said. When she spoke quietly or through tears I couldn’t really make her out. Sometimes I would tiptoe to the kitchen phone and pick it up, silently listening on the other end.

“The therapist says it’s normal,” my mother continued. “After Richard.” She went on to say the same things she always did. The same conversation every time, the same sentences. No one had expected it; even if they had, it couldn’t be easy; there was no standard way to respond to this sort of thing; every child is different; I would hopefully grow out of it with time.

I padded back to my room and sat on my bed, the familiar sinking pit starting to bloom. I pulled the book out and stared at it, running my hand over the glossed cover and flipping quickly through all the pages. I held the book to my chest and dropped back on to the blankets, staring up at my ceiling. All manner of things raced through my head, but most of them focused on my Dad. Sometimes my mother would talk about him, would let him leech into her phone conversations past simply mentioning how hard it all was.

I thought about death until my stomach hurt, until my fingers tingled and my eyes stung and I thought that maybe for a moment I could understand it. Then I got up and padded back to my mother’s room. The lights were long off now, I would miss the familiar tinkle of her bedside lamp’s chain hitting the metal stand, the rustle of ice in glass as she finished her drink, the shuffle of her down comforter being pulled up around her shoulders as she retired. They were the sounds that soothed me, and the sounds that I thought of and imagined as I slipped under the covers next to her and fitfully fell asleep, the rock in my stomach stubborn and pressing against my ribs.


PS I love you FW

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