I've been sort of sitting on this one for a little while now as I study for exams because it makes me feel unsure. It's very different. Uncomfortable. But here it goes regardless.
A story now thrice told, of my mother.
Of my mother’s secret inner hell carried around in her mind long ago.
We were all very small when my mother’s father died, after a struggle with skin cancer. He struggled with the poisonous body ravaging illness, and in my mother’s mind she struggled too. She struggled with the poisonous panic creeping through her thoughts. As he fought and fell, she fought and fell.
We all would gather by his bed to rally around him and share his fight, and when we would leave his house we would cry together when we could see he would lose. But at night we could all slip into sleep, and then nobody was gathered by mother’s bed to share her fight. Scared of sleeping, shaking with panic she would slip down the hall to my sister’s room. And in the small hours of the night, she would pick up Hilary, sit in a rocking chair, and hold her daughter’s three year old body against her own. A parent’s panic of losing a parent ebbing away in time with her young daughters little heart beats.
Nobody knew of this private coping of my mother, of her inner torture, not even Hilary, lying sleeping in my mother’s arms, until this year when missing her father my mother told her daughter. And my sister told me.
A story now thrice told, for Hilary, for me, for you to carry around in your mind too.
