To My Mom On What Might Be Her Last Mother’s Day

When I crawl into bed and snuggle into her soft side, my mom smells of lavender. Each night either my sister or I spray a mist on her hands and face before we put her to bed, a ritual we have kept up since she was diagnosed with brain cancer early last year. Lying beside her is my favorite part of our nightly routine. When I walk into her room after a long day I am tired, too, but as I wheel her to the bathroom I launch into stories about my day, or the funny things my young children have done. When there is extra time I often give her a hand or foot massage, though when I ask her whether she’d prefer me to rub her hands or cuddle in bed, she always chooses the latter, like I do.

Mom (right) and her sister Wendy in Hawaii in the sixties.

 

I often think of the day, several weeks before she was sent by ambulance to the hospital, when I took her calloused feet in my lap and gave her a foot massage. “Why don’t I do this every time we hang out?” I wondered aloud, and Mom just laughed. I knew why, though. My mom wasn’t fond of being touched. I rarely got a hug when she left my house after our weekly lunches. When I said, “I love you Mom,” her most common response was “Mmmhmmm” as she walked away.

 

She doesn’t say much these days, as the tumor has taken up space where her language is formed, but there was a time – not so long ago – when I couldn’t get her to stop talking. Everything got her riled up or excited to solve the puzzle of the complicated symbols and messages that swirled around her. After she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when I was sixteen, her behavior made sense but her diagnosis helped little else. She became homeless after she threatened her mother with a knife, and remained that way until eighteen years later, when a fellow resident at a woman’s shelter found her lying on the floor unable to move her right side.

 

Mom, before her diagnosis.

Rushing to the hospital this time, as a mother myself and as the daughter who had moved to Seattle to help Mom get medication and housing, I found myself at the last stop on a decades-long quest for peace and security: a hospital bed, a diagnosis that afforded little time, and somehow, a place to call her own, not in the way I had imagined, but at a non-profit Lutheran nursing facility that gave her a home when no one else would. When I spend time with her now I walk or drive the half-mile to her home and I know just where to find her, in room 158-W, with a view of the courtyard. She’s on a small dose of an anti-psychotic since her hospital stay, which tames the worst of her delusions. When we walk around the block, or read together, or sit and watch the kids run circles around us, it’s a much less complicated interaction. The paranoia that used to consume her and rule our conversations is at bay, and there is room for the real Judy to emerge. I see who she must have been as a teenager and a young woman: she is sweet, and funny, and she loves to laugh at herself. Her concern that we are safe is no longer all-consuming, and she has room to accept hugs and fist bumps from the young kids to whom she told outlandish stories once upon a time. The other day, when a troubling thought was racing around in her head, when she spoke of “Schwarzenneger’s race cars” and “LA police,” I helped her try to get hold of her struggling mind. “Mom, you can just say, ‘I love my children,’ over and over again if you want to stop thinking about that.” She stopped muttering and looked at me with surprise. After I leaned in to give her a goodbye hug, she motioned with her hand for me to lean in again. In a clear, strong voice – so unlike the tinny one she had used as she tried to expel her dark thoughts – she spoke words from the core of who she is. “You have blessed me with so many blessings.” She squeezed me tight and I teared up as her words filled again the empty space left when her illness took her away from us. I am awed by this woman with a will of steel who endured things that would have crushed me. And I’m so grateful that at the end of her life, she can put aside the fight to survive, and share that part of herself that eluded us all for so long.

Happy Mother’s Day Mom. I’m so glad you are mine.

A Few Dollar Bills and a Diagnosis

In my dresser’s top drawer, tucked away inside a plastic bag that looks like it’s been through the wash, two dollar bills lay folded together. I cannot bear to put the bills in a more appropriate location, or use them for their intended purpose. Sometimes, when I catch sight of the bag, tears spring to my eyes.

I gave these dollars to my mom as she left my house on a Monday in January, as I always have. “Here’s your bus money,” I said, noting how strange it all was, yet how accustomed to it I had become. It was part of our ritual.

The next afternoon I received a surprising, but not unexpected call from Mom’s social worker. Early that morning someone had found her on the floor having difficulty using the right side of her body. She’s had a stroke, I thought. I was sure of it. A few weeks earlier, as she sat on the couch in our back room, she tried and had difficulty touching her right fingers together. I tried to get her to see a doctor, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Her social worker and I had been keeping an eye on her ever since.

By the time my husband had made it home to be with the kids, Mom had been in the hospital for over eight hours. Her face lit up in a smile when she saw me as I rushed into the room, but she was tired and having trouble speaking from what turned out to have been a seizure. Her tongue was swollen and purple from biting it during the ordeal.

Over the next few days a picture unfolded of what was happening inside her brain. “She has a large mass over her left frontal lobe that is pushing into her corpus colossum,” a young, but kind resident doctor told me in the bright hallway outside her room. “We’ll know more tomorrow after the neurosurgeons examine her scans.” As I spoke with family members about what a “large mass” could possibly be, all kinds of hopeful thoughts were offered: perhaps it was benign, perhaps it was a massive blood clot from her concussion twenty years before, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps… The neurosurgeon who came to deliver the news and to show me the pictures of her brain did not have such good news.

“This is a very nasty tumor,” he said, gently. “The life expectancy with tumors like these is between 18-36 months.”

I didn’t hear most of what he said after that. My brain was filled with one thought: if only it had been a stroke.

*   *   *

After wrestling with the doctors not to send her back to the street – which they intended to do the day after we learned her diagnosis, but that’s another LONG story – my mom consented to brain surgery to biopsy the tumor, to a small dose of an anti-psychotic called resperidone, and rested in the hospital for several weeks while we tried to find her a place to stay. “It’s incredible what we’ve been able to accomplish,” my sister rightly said, when I relayed my challenges with getting her housing, the final linchpin in taking care of her. ” If she wasn’t dying, we’d be jumping for joy.”

As we sought out a place for my mother to live, we met wall after wall. Everyone within the Seattle area rejected her because Medicaid is her only insurance and Medicaid pays very little. We were looking at sending her hundreds of miles away, which I couldn’t bear, or taking her into my home, which sounded almost as impossible. And then, a woman at Columbia Lutheran Home, just blocks from my house, said, “You’ve touched my heart. Let me see what I can do.”

Today, almost three months after her diagnosis, my mom is living in a very nice facility – all day long – and just was admitted to hospice care. These days, I would give my right arm for eighteen months, but my mother is unlikely to see her sixtieth birthday this August. Her Stage IV Glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, is beginning to get the upper hand. However, my mother, who has endured heartbreak and hardship for most of her adult life, remains sweet and kind. She is grateful for the chance to see us on a daily basis, and so are we. Her gentle, sweet spirit has shown up during this time of great challenge, and we couldn’t be more grateful for the chance to tell her the things that we’ve always wanted to say, but that didn’t always get communicated in just this way.

We love you. 

We are grateful for you. 

We are so, so glad you are my mother. 

And, always, underneath:

God, how we will miss you. 

I Can’t Tell You

I can’t tell you what it’s like to hear voices. But I can tell you what Mom’s face looks like. How she stops and stares, and listens as if someone were whispering in her ear.

I can’t tell you what causes schizophrenia (and neither, definitively, can the researchers), but if the whole world is made up of spiritual beings, as I somehow come to believe not long ago, then I do not find it hard to imagine that the sinister, frightening, self-destructive things that my mother hears do indeed come from an enemy of her body and soul. I know, because I live in the twenty-first century, that this destruction is a disorder in the physical matter of her mind.

I can’t tell you what goes on in my mom’s body when she hears voices, but I can tell you about the time that I heard the voice of God. I can tell you how I wondered…could this be it? Could this be the beginning of the end? But a greater part of me knew, in that way you somehow just know, that it was indeed the voice of something other than myself.

I can’t tell you if my mom ever wondered if she was losing her mind. If, in her early twenties, the voices that speak to all of us suddenly got louder and more persistent. But I know that as I began to pray, to tune into the spirit within, I wondered which voice, among all the noise that clamored around in my head when I was quiet enough to listen, was the true and lovely voice of God.

I can’t tell you if my mom will ever get well, but I can tell you what it’s like to be her daughter again, and to believe there is reason to hope that my presence in her life makes a difference. To believe that it gives her entry back into the world that was taken from her so long ago, the world where the true and lovely voice of God whispers to me: love her, no matter what – even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it’s scary, even when it’s frustrating. Love her, and be with her, and she will be yours again, and you, hers.

We All Want to Belong

Mom has been coming over to my house on Fridays for awhile now. She usually she just sits on the couch and sips her tea and writes inscrutable things in magazines and catalogs while the kids play. Every now and then she’ll pipe up. “I bought Spencer a potty. He’s old enough to use one now.” Or, “The gluten free pasta is really what he needs. I’ll send some.” Sometimes she’ll take a bath or a nap.  And she always empties the bathroom trash.

A few weeks ago the sun was shining, and when that happens in the Pacific Northwest, you get outside, stat. Quinn and Spencer and I were weeding while Mom sat on the couch. Quinn was filling up her watering can and watering the flowers and the weeds both. Spencer had a child-sized rake that he pulled along behind him as he followed me from one garden bed to another. Mom came out the door while we were working on the strawberry patch. First she sat in one of the Adirondack chairs with her eyes closed. Then she got up and walked around the perimeter of the yard. After watching for a few minutes I went back to work, building my pile of those blasted shot-weeds that are trying to conquer everything. Next thing I knew Mom had made her way to the shed, found the aerator, and started working on the lower section of the lawn. After a few rows she took off her sweater, and it was just the family, doing yard work together.

For some reason, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Besides the  professional looking white blouse, she looked like anyone doing yard work in her jeans and the rain boots. Wisps of hair fell out of her ponytail and into her face, and she kept tucking them behind her ear in between the step and pull of the aerator. She was totally devoted to her task and she wasn’t going to stop no matter how many times I told her she didn’t have to do it. She wouldn’t stop because she wanted to help, just like she wants to take out the trash and “buy” us food. She wants to be part of our lives, to make a contribution. To feel valued and part of something bigger than herself. Just like everyone.

As I watched Mom working alongside us, smiling in the sun, I was struck by what a crucial difference these Fridays make in her life.  I though about my decision not to go back to India but to come here and start to rebuild our relationship. For so many years after making the choice to move to Seattle I berated myself for being cowardly, for choosing the “easy” life over the sacrificial life in the slums of Kolkata. Even though I felt guilty about it for years, times like these cement the thought that maybe it wasn’t a mistake. Maybe it wasn’t my fear or selfishness. Maybe it was just the right thing to do, out of many good options. Maybe it’s what I needed. And what Mom needed too.

I Choose You, Mom

This morning as I drove home from dropping my daughter off at pre-school I was listening to a program on my local public station.  The topic was “Without Them There’s No This: A Valentine’s Special.”  I heard several callers talk about the most important people in their lives – spouses, children, parents.  A man from Bellingham, a “ne’er do-well artist” who says he pushed his adolescence “as far as it could go” spoke of the neighbor he fell in love with at 41.  He adopted her three children and then they had one of their own. You could tell he was wouldn’t go back to his former life for anything.  There was a mother who daily cares for her non-verbal daughter who lives with a demanding condition.  She spoke with love and gratitude in her voice as she shared how she has learned to be present and to live into every moment.

As I listened to these callers speak of the people they have chosen to love I thought first of Mom.  I have two amazing children, but loving them is the easiest thing I’ve ever done.  It’s a little more work with my husband sometimes, but I am still very much in love with him as we go into our seventh year of marriage.

Mom is a different story.  Loving my mom has changed me.  It’s hard not to love her cute shuffle and absent-minded head scratching. I enjoy hersmile when she looks at one of the kids and her relaxed pose as she sits with a cup of tea.  She’s challenging though, when she is agitated and can’t let an idea go.  Some days she will talk full-tilt, almost manically, from the moment I pick her up until I drop her off.  And then there’s the days where she talks of killing people and blowing up banks, when she says my husband is trying to steal all my money and leave me.  Then I just want to drop her off at the library and drive off.

All the same, like the callers today,  I am grateful that my mom is in my life.  I take the good days with the bad because that’s just life.  I try to be grateful for the fact that we have each other at all – so many people don’t even have their parents anymore – and I am so fortunate that she is not as ill as some schizophrenics I have seen, or gone, either by alcoholism or death, like the parents of some of my friends.

So, Mom, you are my Valentine.  I choose you because I can’t imagine my life without you.  Who do you choose on this silly, but somehow meaningful holiday?  Who has changed you?

Mom Putters Before the Snow

Mom putters about the house, finding projects.  Out on the deck, the charcoal needs putting away before the big snow.  From the upstairs window I see her searching around, wondering, what will keep it dry?  A plastic bag?  A slab of wood? Aha…the shed, a few steps beyond the deck, already overflowing.

The trash is taken out and the sink emptied when I come downstairs.  Now she can sit, steaming mug of tea in hand, ankles crossed, shoring up her strength for her next task.  It is the lists that occupy her subsequent hours: the lists of food we will need to have on hand – she’ll have

enough delivered to our door for the next week (because you never know how long the snow could last).  She writes deliberately, with brow furrowed and back hunched, stopping here and there to ask, “Corn chex?  Can Spencer eat corn chex?  What about mac and cheese?”  This task, no less important – no, perhaps more in her eyes – to our well-being.  Like any mother, she will have us fed.  That is her job, even if she doesn’t have a house in which to cook for us.  I tire of these delusions, but I am grateful she  feels that she is helping.  And in some ways, she is, just by being here.

In the kitchen, I flit from task to task: from dishwasher to Quinn’s coloring to prepping dinner.  Would that I could pay more attention to her questions, her theories, as she sits and drinks, sits and writes.  I have time – if I could just stop – to sit and talk and snuggle into her plump side.  For today, I do not take it.  Next time, I hope I will.

It’s the Budget Cuts, Mom.

Call social worker.  I should get it tattooed on my hand.  Or my daughter’s forehead; I spend a lot of time looking there.  Call social worker.  I should get it tattooed somewhere because I always need to do it, and I almost never do.

My mom needs help, and I can’t always give it.   “My payee is stealing my money,” Mom says.  “I need underwear and pants and a coat and an umbrella.  My knees are so tired from walking up the hill to see you.”

I wish I could ease my mom’s situation a bit more; I wish I could get her a bus pass and be sure she wouldn’t toss it in the garbage.  Would the social worker be able to help me with that?  If I buy Mom the things she needs will she just throw them away or give them away like she did with the coat I bought a month ago?   Quinn needs a raincoat, too, and Spencer is growing so fast he already needs another wardrobe.

This is what I want to tell my mother:  “You’ve had two social workers in as many years, and now another one because of budget cuts.  I don’t even remember the new one’s name.  That’s probably why you aren’t getting any money either.  Budget cuts.  You know those people camped out downtown?  They’re trying to do something about it.”

My sister Posey and Mom yucking it up.

This is what she will probably tell me:  “They stole my money, those whores at Hammond House.  I have equity at 3931 42^nd Ave.  I’ll just move into my new house, and you can visit me there.  I won’t have to leave, and I won’t need a rain coat.”

I wish she could understand.  It’s the budget cuts, Mom.  But would it make it any better?  It would still be impossible.  It’s impossible either way.

Somehow, she’s still got a beautiful smile, and she can still laugh.  She can still laugh even when she’s soaking wet and sore and tired of walking around downtown.  She’s a survivor; somehow she has endured all of this for fifteen years.  Now.  Maybe, maybe, maybe, if I call the social worker she’ll be able help.  All I have to do is pick up the phone.

Blue Like Jazz the Movie: Some Thoughts

I saw Blue Like Jazz a bit ago, now.  I liked it.  I’m sure you’re not surprised.

I’m biased, but I really liked it, I did.  And I laughed.  A lot.  It probably has something to do with the fact that I was sitting next to

Claire Holt, playing "Penny"

Don, who laughed even at the parts I didn’t get (the sound still has to be calibrated, or something like that).  It was so fun to sit together and watch the movie adapted from his book, with fictional characters based on our lives.  Fun and not as weird as I thought it would be.

I’ve been used to the idea of seeing someone named Penny on the screen for a while now.  Don sent me the screenplay several years back.  I was immensely flattered that he had created such a virtuous character and put my name on it.  I was flattered, and a little dismayed.

I texted Don my thoughts on the movie.  They went something like this:  “I love it!  You did such a great job portraying Reed.  And you made me look like hot shit!”

Don, being ever sensitive to portraying his friends on the page and on the screen, texted me back a worried – I might even say agonized – message.  “You think I made you look like shit? I’m so sorry!”

I had to explain to Don, as I feel I must explain to you, that it’s difficult to be immortalized at the age of 21.  Especially when you are immortalized to fit the dictates of fast-paced, conflict-driven story writing.  Without giving any details away I’ll just say that Penny-in-the-film is a lot more virtuous and dare-devil than Penny-in-the-flesh.

There were several parts where Penny talks about her mother, and these bits made me tear up – cry, even.  I’m not sure what they’ll do to you, but it was difficult to see her struggle with the reality of having a homeless and schizophrenic mother.  But, at least for me, it was liberating, too.  It’s been nine years since I was at Reed and ignoring my mom, and we’ve come a long way since then.  I no longer have to deal with the guilty and shameful feelings of knowing I’ve let my mother languish on the streets with no one to care for her.  I’m glad Penny’s story is no longer my own.

Blue Like Jazz is a good, and above all, funny movie.  I’ll definitely watch it again and again.  I may not have the same response as those who grew up in the church, because that’s just not my story.  I’ll leave it to the rest of you to decide whether it did a good job portraying the struggle to come to terms with one’s upbringing and one’s faith.  For me, I resonated with the struggle to be honest and true to yourself, even when it’s not a popular thing to do.  Truth be told, that’s still a lesson I am learning.

—–

One final thing:  you should know, Penny in the movie may be cooler than Penny in real life, but I’ll tell you what:  my conversion story is way better than hers!  For that, you’ve got to read the book.  (***OK, when I say stuff like that, it hits me: It’s so weird, it’s so weird, it’s so weird to be immortalized in a book and a movie!!***)

Thanks for reading.

You Scare Me, Mom. And You Scare My Kids. But We’re Gonna Be Okay.

The kids and I pulled up to the bus stop by Macrina Bakery on Queen Anne Hill, expecting to see Mom sitting there waiting, a smile ready.  Instead, she was talking – if you could call it that – to the smartly dressed woman sharing the bus shelter with her.  The woman was wearing crisp dress pants and a perfectly ironed oxford.  Her hair fell in one clean line along her jaw.  She was dressed to deliver a masterful closing argument or rousing speech.  Next to her, Mom looked like she’d just rolled out of bed.  From what I could see of her clothes and hair, she seemed to have been caught in the rainstorm that had hit with shocking force an hour before.  Her hair was stringy and pulled into a sloppy ponytail.  Her clothes were splotchy with moisture.  In some kind of reversal of the divide that should exist between these two women, they were barely six inches apart.  Mom was staring right at her and I got the distinct impression she was not being kind.

“Oh, no,” I said, to the quiet of the car.

When Mom saw us she walked quickly out of the shelter, threw something in the trash with force, as if to punctuate her statement, and yelled back at the woman.  Then she opened the door, and turned to lob one last bomb.  “You can go to hell!”

Mom turned back to the car and plopped down in the seat.

“Hi Mom.”  I said, as calmly as I could.  “You okay?”

Her jaw was rigid, her eyes hard.  She stared out the windshield as she spoke.   “She stole my glasses, and that’s my briefcase, and yeah, if you can call standing next to the woman who stole your house okay, well…”   A feeling of dread closed in on me.  I hadn’t seen her like this in almost a decade.  For some reason the only thing I could think to do was to apologize to the woman she had just assaulted.

I looked at the woman in the shelter, trying to catch her eye, to mouth “I’m sorry.”  But she looked everywhere but at us.  And then I lost my mind.  I rolled down the window and spoke to the woman as if Mom wasn’t there.  Somewhere in the back of my head I guess I thought, Mom’s been so normal lately.  She won’t mind.    

“I’m sorry; she can’t help herself.”  I said, out the window.  I didn’t have the chance to see if she acknowledged me because a second later Mom pushed the passenger door open forcefully and heaved herself out of the seat.

“You know, she told me that you could shove it up my ass!”  she yelled, as if this were an old fight, as if she was tired of explaining herself, again and again, to someone who didn’t understand.  “And you agree?  You can go to hell, too,” she said, and slammed the car door.

The tears were immediate; shockingly immediate.  “Oh no.  Oh, Mommy, I’m sorry. So, so stupid.  So stupid!  Why did I do that?”  I checked traffic quickly, as if to chase her down, then realized she might take bus money even if she didn’t want to talk to me.  I grabbed the diaper bag to retrieve my wallet when I heard a little peep from the back seat.

“Mommy, why are you crying?”  Quinn asked.

 

I was shocked all over again as I realized that Quinn had been witness to it all.  I looked back at her, and then back the way Mom had gone.  Not myself but somehow on autopilot, I took a deep breath, pulled away from the curb, and spoke distractedly as tears rolled down my cheeks faster than I could swipe them away.  “Honey, Mommy is crying because Gramma’s brain doesn’t work right and it makes me sad.  She doesn’t know what she is doing.  She loves us, but she can’t help herself from saying mean things sometimes.”

Quinn was quiet while I drove slowly up the street.  Feeling a little more in control, or at least like I had no other option, I peered down the streets and up ahead.  I had to mend the break.  Or at least give her some bus money.  She was always asking for ibuprofen for her knees and her legs after she walked up the hill to meet us on Mondays.  I turned right and watched for her as we drove along 6th Avenue West, a neighborhood in Queen Anne with beautiful houses that must irk Mom every time she passes them.  I spotted her hunched figure and I pulled to the curb a little ahead of her as I fumbled in my diaper bag.  Before I was ready Mom wrenched the door open.  She spoke with such force she practically spat at me.   “She stole from me.  My glasses!  My house!”  (She said more, but I’ll spare you the rest.)  Then, as if to solidify the break, she yelled,  “Now get out of here!” and threw her coin purse at me.  And then she ran away again, in the direction of downtown and her home, the shelter on Pike and Third Avenue.

As soon as Mom slammed the door Quinn started crying and I was startled out of my head again.  She was not just crying, she was bawling.  Bawling like the time a dog bit her face and there was blood in her hair and on her nose and on her favorite dress.  I ran around to her door feeling like a total failure on all accounts.  I unbuckled her and held her tight while she sobbed; while we both sobbed.  “It’s okay, honey.  It’s gonna be okay.”  When she quieted down again we got back in the car and took deep breaths.  “You wanna go see Daddy for lunch?” I asked after a few moments.  We both needed to see a friendly face.

“Yeah!”  she said, sounding genuinely excited.  I gave myself permission to just drive, not to apologize over and over again, or explain.  But to just drive and breathe.  We’d take care of the rest later.  Quinn was quiet too while I drove down the hill to my husband’s work, and every time I checked on her in the mirror she was looking out the window.  We drove this way for awhile, each in our own thoughts.  All was silent except for the rubbery squeak of Spencer chewing on his Sophie giraffe.

“Mommy?”  Quinn asked, when we were almost to South Lake Union.

“Yes, sweetie?”  I asked, relieved that she sounded normal again.

“Lila’s Mom is nice.  We should go have lunch with Lila from now on instead of grumpy old Gramma.”

“Okay, honey, we’ll see.”  I said, in the most normal voice I could muster.  But my heart was breaking.

***

A few hours later my phone rang, with only the numbers 2 – 0 – 6 showing up on the phone’s face.

“It’s Gramma!” I yelled, and picked up.  “Hello?”

 “Hi Penny.”

“Mommy, oh Mommy, you called.  I’m so sorry.”

“You know, that woman really was connected to the Hazens.  She was a thief.”

“I know, Mommy, I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Yeah, I needed to protect you.  I didn’t want them to know you were with me.  Did you know that when you slam your car door bullets shoot out?”

“No, I didn’t’ know that.”  I said, surprised by the extent of her delusions, and the way she had figured out how to protect our relationship.  I wasn’t “the other Penny,” as I’d often been before, but this worked, too.

“Well, they won’t hurt you.  I took care of that.  And you know, if your brain is all scrambled maybe you need to stop living with Dave.  You can live in my old house at 3821 41^st Avenue.”

“OK.  Thanks Mom.”  I said.  I would say anything to repair the damage.

“So when should we meet next?” she asked, and when I heard her say it all the knots inside came apart, and I could move again.  I slid down the couch and curled into a little ball on the seat, holding the phone like a cherished object.  It was going to be okay.  Not a year later, like last time, but hours later.  It was really going to be okay.

After we had made plans to meet I heard Spencer waking up from his afternoon nap.  “Mom, I have to go, but I’ll see you in a week, okay?  I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said, and  hung up.

“And we’ll figure out how to repair the damage to Quinn,” I whispered into the silent line.  I hoped, somehow, she was going to be okay, too.

Notes from the Summer I Was Fourteen

I lay on my bed in the light-filled attic rooms Grammie has converted for us so we feel welcome (and safe?).  Grammie fashioned our curtains and duvets, like Scarlett’s dress, from the curtains in the back bedroom that no one uses anymore.  They look like a painting, the bright pink and green passionflowers and pomegranate climbing the wall and the length of our beds.  But like Scarlett, we are lying.  It isn’t normal here and this isn’t our home.

Downstairs, Mom yells.  She yells all the time now.  We don’t know what about; we’d rather stay up here with our radio set to the station that plays Nirvana and Soundgarden, masking everything but the sun streaming through the window.  I am fourteen, not old enough to be reading the romance novel with the red and gold cover.  Not old enough to read the paper bag full of them that sits next to my bed.  But this is how I get through my summer.  This is how I have always gotten through.

Mom hasn’t always been a yeller.  But she’s different now.  She hasn’t said – or even yelled – “I love you, ” in years, and this Mom may be here to stay.