The Paradox of You

When my mother was dying in East Jefferson Hospital in November of 2009, I didn’t know my son had already been born. I had braided her once thick hair into tiny braids on each side of her face, which gave her a youthful appearance. She had entered the hospital on Bastille day, having called me late in the evening saying something’s wrong. I was walking home to the LaLa from Swirl with Tatjana, who was very drunk, so that when my mother called, I helped Tatjana slide down onto the sidewalk while I spoke to my mom.

I was at my mom’s house in record time. She lived in Metairie, in an apartment complex with mostly workers from Honduras and Nicaragua. I went up the concrete stairway to the second floor taking two steps at a time. Two men were sitting below, outside their half opened door where Spanish music was wafting in the humid air. I said, “Buenos,” as I passed them. When I got inside, my mom was in her bed, wearing an emerald green nightgown. She had been throwing up red wine in a cup. I sat on the bed and asked her what was wrong, and noticed her whole body was twitching. Soon she was in a state of high agitation.

“Mom, we have to go to the emergency room,” I said. In the next few minutes, I was able to find her purse, get her shoes on, and half carry her down the stairs as she moaned. When the men saw us at the bottom of the stairs, one said, “¿Que pasa?” I kept moving and wasn’t in any mood for niceties. I tried to heave my mother up into the passenger seat of my truck. One man was coming towards us to help. By now both men were getting louder. ¿Qué pasa, Patsy? No te mueras, Patsy. ¿Qué pasó, Patsy? No te mueras, Patsy.

My mother was having a heart attack. I spent 24 hours with her in the emergency room at East Jefferson as they stabilized her. [And had I known what was coming next, I would have let her die in her bed with me by her side.]

For the next days, weeks, months, my mother was stabilized then detoxed and had to be tied down then fell, then started a series of bodily shut downs that led her to have a tube in every orifice in her body. She was in and out of ICU. A month in, she got up out of her bed and fell flat on her face and had to be rushed to surgery to fix a broken nose and cheek.

During this time, my whole life was in a downward spiral. The 2008 recession had hit my company and my sector hard. I covered global media for one of the largest independent research firms on Wall Street. Media was in the crosshairs of a 20-year secular change while Wall Street was in a downward cyclical spiral. All of this was a backdrop to my house terrors that ruled my life from 2005 to 2007 to get passed Katrina and into the LaLa – the house of my dreams.

I was two failed adoptions in as I sat by my mother’s hospital bed. She rubbed the side of her bed in a provocative motion, staring at me through her once glamorous green eyes now covered in a milky film that made them look like fish eyes as she pronounced, “I’m making room for the baby.”

I closed my eyes and put my forehead down on the side of her bed. My tears were hard to summon because I had cried too many of them. “There’s no baby, mom. The last adoption failed.” She smiled coyly, milky-eyed, and rubbed some more: “I’m making room for the baby,” she said.

Towards the end of November, the team of doctors began talking to me about long-term care or hospice where my mother would be kept alive until she couldn’t. I went to her hospital room one day and crawled in bed beside her. I put my arm over her chest and whispered in her ear. “Mom, it’s okay to let go. I love you. I know you love me. But you can let go now.”

She fell asleep. I got up to use the bathroom, and when I walked back towards her bed, she was beckoning me over with her curved pointer finger in an exaggerated fashion much like all of the gestures I had ever seen her make – dramatic, with flourish – I approached the bed and moved closer to her lips that were pursed as she started to say something.

“I thank God every day for you,” she whispered.

Sixteen years later, I sat in an ACA group and talked about how my mom had let me down. How her alcoholism had meant she couldn’t be present for me, she couldn’t be a role model for me, she couldn’t be at graduations, she couldn’t protect me from my rageaholic father, she couldn’t show up for me the way I had wanted her to. I had written my mom a letter in 1990 that accused her of her crimes. I had declared I had wanted Helen of Troy as my mom – a strong woman, someone I could model my womanhood off of – instead I had been given her, a beautiful but weak woman who saw the world through Chardonnay glasses.

This was not my finest moment.

I have slowly built a portrait of the paradox of my mother in my mind – a woman who loved me, who so desperately wanted to get off of the dairy farm she was born into, who married a foreigner to show her the world, whose world grew smaller instead of larger as we moved and moved and moved, whose beauty knew no bounds, who had two daughters and four step sons – the oldest closer to her age, who lived in Cuba, Nicaragua, San Salvador, Puerto Rico, Panama and all around the the U.S. with a rageaholic and jealous husband. Who urged her daughters to never get married, told them they could be anything they set their minds to, while she answered, “Yes, sir,” to my father and couldn’t leave the house without his permission.

In my son’s creation story, he is born to another mother, but he has chosen me to be his parent. When he was nine months old, I told him my mother drew a gold thread from him to me, and after she died on a Monday, the journey was set in motion. On Tuesday, I would fly home from NY, we would bury her on Wednesday, on Thursday, I would get sick from all of the stress, on Friday, I would receive a call, a baby boy needed me, come now, I would drive in my car on a Saturday, collapse in my friend’s house on Sunday, and on Monday, I would meet my son. A gold thread tethered me – one Monday in December, I went from tending to the body of my dying mother to the following Monday tending to the body of my infant son – one profound AF week.

The first thing I said to my son after I strapped him into the car seat and drove towards Indianapolis where I would stand in front of a judge to legally adopt him was, “I thank God for you.” Now I’m the mother who will be judged for all my shortcomings, for all I didn’t do or say, for all the times I have failed him, for being a paradox.