My Girls 10/04/2006

SICU - Surgical Intensive Care Unit, Rush Hospital.  We sit in the atriumesque lounge where forgotten get well balloons are stuck to the vents 50 feet above us on the wall.  We wait an hour and a half in order to spend fifteen minutes nurturing mom.  It's me, Renee, Pauline, and Rog today.  Mom is off the ventilator, talking and even cracking jokes.  I got to watch her slip into deep happy sleep with snoring and everything.  She said to Renee, "you guys are wonderful!"  Renee and Pauline are talking chakras and reiki.  Dad is, as per Rog, handling it all like it's nothing.  He is only slightly obnoxious today.   He bought lunch and he is putting up with our jabs at his character with a sense of humor.

Going in now.

4:30 - 5:05.  We eeked out an extra 20 minutes.  Jen showed up mid visit so the 3 of us (me, Renee, and Jen) were in with her together.  Mom was upset and in pain and we were working, probably too hard, to make her feel better.

Renee asked, "what can we do to make you more comfortable?" and she said, "just what you're doing."

Jenny was crying a little (real quietly so she wouldn't give herself away to mom).  I tried to put mom in her happy place - floating her on her back in an imaginary pool at the imaginary spa with the giftshop full of fabulous stuff and everything is eight dollars...she smiled.  Some time passed quietly - Renee was sending love and strength through mom's feet as she massaged them.  Jen and I just stood nearby and opened our hearts so wide they ached -- and she mumbled:

"Jennifer?"
"Right here, mom."
"Renee?"
"I'm still here, mom, I love you."
"Gina?"
"I'm here, too, mom."

She smiled, comforted, and said, "my girls," then drifted of to sleep again.

I have never been so glad to be exactly where I was...right then.


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*These difficult times are always peppered (or sugared?) with joy and goodness.

For the past year, more or less, my relationship with mom has been strained.  I was choosing to feel pressured by her need for attention, and annoyed by her choices and her often gloomy attitude.  I was choosing to believe she was manifesting sickness and drama, and that did not suit my new desire to choose joy as often as I could.  There was all kinds of anger and resentment in me when I was around her.  Eventually we got into a fight which caused a 12 month silence between us.  There are several entries about this in my notebooks, which I will share or not, depending on what I decide then.  My point, now, I guess, is that revisiting this, and then reading Jason Mraz's blog: a taste of my own medicine, has opened me.  I see a version of me who wanted an excuse to exclude.  I see I've been missing out on a kind of joy that comes with caring for others...with caring for mothers.  I don't need to care for her, because that need would insist on her needing care, but I can still find the goodness in providing comfort for a woman who gave me so much.  I can still choose joy and be in a relationship with her.  I can let go of my resistance and accept her right where she is, as she has ALWAYS accepted me... until now.   And I don't blame her for that.  Today I will begin the journey to stop tolerating her, and start accepting her with my heart so wide open, it aches.