OPINION: Echoes from my mother
“I wasn’t planning on coming back, you know,” Mom told me over the phone, through radio waves reaching from Seattle to Brooklyn.
“Oh. I didn’t know that,” I said calmly, though her words echoed in my chest, waking the sleeping bats inside me, dangling upside down off of each rib. Until she said that, I didn’t know that nearly 10 years ago when she had moved to Spain she never intended on returning to her life in Seattle. To me.
When we got off the phone I walked to the edge of my bed to sit down. I pressed my palm into the comforter, spreading my fingers apart, pushing my hand to sink down into the blanket. My breathing turned into faint whimpers coming from my nose until my lips parted, allowing wails to escape through my mouth, the suppressed abandonment at the core of my being awakened. My fingers curled into my palm until I was grasping a wad of fabric in my fist. All I felt were the bats flying wildly in my chest, trapped in my ribcage. Their panic and shrieks and flying — I was gasping for air, trying to heave in air, trying to breathe, trying to function — I couldn’t function. All I knew was the desolate gaping black-hole-of-an-abyss inside, where all my love for everyone disappears into without any return.
My grief for the mother I needed versus the mother that was, was still as raw when I was 16 as it was after that phone conversation, at 26, living in Brooklyn independent from the dysfunctional Seattle household I grew up in, 2,400 miles away.