The Beginning
In the past, I’ve written pieces about my own personal journey with tragedy, but all the “how to start a blog” advice pieces don’t really encourage 19 page ramblings with unclear timelines and resolutions. So let me start over.
My mom always tells me and everyone she knows that without me, her life would have been drastically different. She was skipping school and partying with no clear path to a successful future just yet and then I came along. I was an accident, a product of a party encounter with a good-for-nothing man at 22 years old. After she gave birth, she left the hospital with five dollars to her name, a newborn baby in her arms and an eviction notice stuck to her door.
She had to fight for me. She stayed alive for me. She dedicated her life to building one for me. I don’t thank her enough for that.
When I was eight years old, for a few months, the man whose sperm gave way to my existence attempted to make his way back into my life, but the hole he had never occupied had been steadily filled by my mom. She was my best friend. Everywhere she went, I followed. Every joke she told, I would try to emulate. She was my everything. I had no need for good-for-nothing sperm donors and soon enough, the man who called himself my father disappeared again.
My mom described her life to me as directionless. She had gone to college then dropped out, gone again, then dropped out again. But eventually, she found her place in the world of education. She always told me it was my own years as a young child which made her want to be a preschool teacher. When I was in kindergarten, she began student teaching in my school.
I remember the feeling of excitement I had every time I heard her keys jingling as she made her way to pick me up. She would make her way down the hallway to my classroom, laughing and joking with the teachers and as she walked into the room, it seemed to get brighter.
After graduating from college, she took substitute teaching jobs as often as she could until she landed her first real preschool teaching job. It was only for the last half of the school year and it was in a sundown town (so she was told). The next school year, she landed a teaching job in Glasgow, Kentucky and I moved schools with her.
And she was wonderful. It was like the entire institution of preschool was made for her. To this day, students she taught in preschool recognize me or my last name and tell me how much she changed their lives. They tell me how much they loved her. How much they wish every teacher cared as much as she did. They ask me how she’s doing, and I always say she’s doing great.
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In 2016, my mother became sick. Doctors and specialists shrugged their shoulders and shook their heads in disbelief as my mother laid out her symptoms for them. They told her they’d figure it out and ordered thousands of dollars worth of tests while my mother’s condition only got worse. They carelessly tossed around possible diagnoses like diabetes, multiple sclerosis and cancer.
If I were smarter (and enjoyed research a little more) I could make this story about how the American healthcare system is a failure. About how it failed my family and nearly destroyed us. I could talk about the mistreatment of Black people in the healthcare system and how it gets people killed for no good reason. But I’m not that smart, and honestly, I’m way too lazy for research. Therefore, I’ll let you make your own deductions.
It took us three years to receive my mother’s diagnosis. And while we waited, she slowly and painfully became paralyzed.
Over those years, we became different people with a completely different relationship. Sometimes I wonder if we can ever be normal again. I look at the way other women connect with their mother and I wonder if I’ll ever have that again.
All the while, my mother was grappling with something called spinal stenosis. More than 200,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with this condition every year. Two-hundred thousand. It could have been treatable with physical therapy, medication and the possibility of surgery down the line.
The way it was described to us was that it’s extremely common for people to have a touch of spinal stenosis is what I believe the nurse said. However, my mother’s diagnosis came so late that her spine narrowed and then calcified, resulting in the necessity of surgery and my mother being wheelchair bound for what seems to be the rest of her life.
I’ve accepted everything that happened to us but I don’t understand it. I have so many questions that will never have any answers. How could our lives fall apart so tremendously and how could we just watch it happen? Why couldn’t we be the family who had savings for when disaster struck? Why didn’t I have a father who actually gave a shit about me and my mother? Why didn’t we ask for help sooner? And if we had asked for help sooner, would my mother be able to stand on her own two feet right now?
She had only been feeling bad for a few months when she went to the doctor the first time— the first doctor and the first round of tests. She told him something wasn’t right. She said her legs felt heavy and her feet had begun to swell. The doctor told her she needed to lose weight. He said her legs wouldn’t work because she wasn’t using them. It sounded logical enough and when she told me about the visit, the diagnosis kind of made sense to me, but she was frustrated.
“How the fuck can I use my legs if my legs aren’t working,” she asked me without the expectation of an answer. And I didn’t have one.
After a few visits over a few months, the doctor became frustrated with her and told her as much. He told her she didn’t want to get better. He told her she didn’t want to improve upon her own life so what could he possibly do for her? He tore her down then told her he would no longer be her doctor.
The words he used, I believe, were: “You’re going to have a stroke. And you’re young so you’ll survive it. And I won’t have that on my conscience.”
I became angry while my mother became resigned.
“Who does something like that,” I said. “It’s his fucking job to make you better.”
“I’ll find a new one,” she said. “He wasn’t dedicated to making me feel better anyway. I want someone who wants me to feel better.”
The ridiculousness of that statement still astounds me. What kind of doctor isn’t dedicated to making his patients feel better? What kind of doctor ignores his patient’s pleas for help and passes judgments on them instead of doing his job? To me, that’s the kind of doctor who deserves to lose his license.
Looking back and seeing where my mother is now– I not only want his license, I want to cause him bodily harm. I want to look him in his eyes while I kick him, and punch him, and fuck him up like he fucked our entire lives up. I want to take his shirt in my hand and shove him against the wall holding his medical degrees and accolades like they do in the movies and make him fear for his life– like I feared for my mother’s and my own. I want him to feel the pain he put us through. It could’ve all ended with him, years ago– before she lost her job, before we lost our home, before she was paralyzed. We didn’t have to go through any of it.
As my mom’s health declined, the term “good leg day” became ingrained in our vocabulary. When she had good leg days, she would try to go to the grocery store or maybe even do some cleaning or cooking. She’d try to get as many things as she could packed into a few hours or maybe even a whole day if we were lucky. After a while, good leg days came less often. She stopped cleaning and cooking. Bags of fast-food littered the spaces around her while she searched on the internet for illnesses having to do with “numbness in the feet and legs”.
I watched my mom degenerate slowly from the inside out. Her illness consumed every part of her. She became impatient and tired. Confused and angry. Distraught and ashamed. Frantic and obsessive, researching the symptoms she was experiencing and cross-referencing them with diseases she found online.
I can’t quite remember when she fell for the first time. I know it was the middle of the day. She was going to work late because she had been up all night trying to get comfortable. I was sitting on our couch, wishing she would leave so I could play my music as loud as I wanted and strut around our townhouse like I was the headliner of some music festival.
At the time, we had no idea the fall was because of what was happening inside of her body. It became something we laughed about.
“Who falls in the shower and breaks their nose,” my mom would say to her friends. “Of course that would happen to me.”
I remember the sound of her body hitting the floor. I called out to her.
“Mom?” And I waited for 3 ticks. “Mom!” I waited again.
After no answer, I had the hopeful thought that she just couldn’t hear me. I walked halfway up the stairs.
“Mom?” No answer.
I turned the corner and saw her body crumpled up on the floor of the bathtub. She was still coming out of whatever had happened to her, whimpering softly and looking at me with desperation in her eyes. The water fell over her upper half, ran into her eyes and soaked her hair. I remember shaking off the shock and running to turn off the shower. I hurriedly tried to turn the faucet and without thinking, I turned off the cold water before the hot. I remember the steam rolling off her body and into my face.
I remember her pleas. She tried to squirm out of the water’s path– begging me to turn it off, just please turn it off. Her head had hit the knob to the hot water so hard, the pipe had bent out of shape. I pulled at the bent handle, using all my strength to turn the water off while repeating: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
When we finally got her out of the bathtub, she sat on the edge of her bed and said she was exhausted. She told me she didn’t need to go to the hospital, she just wanted to sleep. I insisted she get dressed. I threw a towel at her so she could dry off and picked out an outfit that was easy to put on but still socially acceptable to wear in public.
This would be the first time our power dynamic would shift. I eventually took on the role of a parent. Insisting she gets dressed, cooking, cleaning the house and, at the end, her bodily fluids.
I was meant to be strong, I think– to take it all on my back and ensure we kept our heads above water. I was meant to do that, but I didn’t. I drowned in my own illness while my mother drowned in hers and I’m still surprised it didn’t kill us both.
This is not the beginning to a glamorous story about perseverance that could be inspiring to others. It’s the beginning of how our lives fell apart. Of how we lost our home, of how we became shells of our former selves.
At no point did we thrive, nor did we “rise above it”. We floundered and drowned and suffered. We had no answers and eventually we gave up looking for them and instead became completely numb to the horribleness that was our lives and simply tried to make it.