Growing up, I was a sickly little kid, like those pale Victorian children who are sent to the seaside for fresh air and sun to recover from whatever is Generally Wrong With Them. When I was born, my umbilical cord was wrapped around my foot, so I spent the first year of my life wearing special shoes to straighten out my little fucked up feet. When I got a little older, my skin was chronically dry and cracked, so I couldn’t play in the sandbox without risking sand making its way into the crevices of my hands.
Then, when I was nine years old, I woke up one morning to find that I was covered in pinpricks and bruises. I didn’t know what had happened to me to cause them, but I knew something was probably off. After school, my mom took me to the doctor, where they were like “yeah, sorry, you gotta get this girl to a hospital.” I presented (Grey’s Anatomy word) with all the symptoms of leukemia — and after a spinal tap (very painful, do not recommend) — the doctors concluded that I had idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, or ITP. Basically my body wasn’t making any platelets, and thus, the pinpricks and bruises indicated internal bleeding. I was only scared, briefly, when I first found out, but I mostly remember sleeping a lot and being bored in the hospital for the week I stayed there.
My mom, on the other hand, was a wreck. She slept in my hospital room every night, on a pullout couch next to my bed. Even though I didn’t feel scared, per se, I know I wouldn’t have liked being alone in that hospital room, either. But as difficult being sick might have been for me, it was much worse on my mom.
After this brush with ITP, I was mostly healthy again, save for a brush with mono not long after I’d been released from the hospital. (Getting diagnosed with mono on my 10th birthday is something I can’t explain to this day, as I promise I had yet to kiss even one boy.)
I’ve written before about how when my mom was sick, she talked about feeling like she was living in an “alternative universe.” Since she died, I’ve continued to feel the same way. (The whole ongoing pandemic thing hasn’t helped, either.) It’s as though I got zapped into the wrong timeline, and without her, everything is just slightly different than it should be. Even on days that are Good Days, it’s like something’s gnawing at me, like I misplaced my keys or forgot to get something at the grocery store.
Of course, I spend a lot of time wondering what my life would be like if my mom was alive — not only about the time we’d spend together, the conversations we’d have, what she would think about everything going on in my life and the TV shows I’m watching (more often than not those two things are one in the same). And maybe this is selfish, but I long for not having this sort of heavy baggage of a dead parent, an experience that unmoored me so completely I still feel disconnected from who I am, who I was.
Lately, though, when I imagine my life had my mom not died, I wonder if maybe something else catastrophic might have happened. Like maybe in that scenario…I’m the one who died somehow. I realize this could sound crazy, but the only way I can rationalize or make sense of something that feels so deeply senseless and unfair is to imagine some sort of Butterfly Effect, where as hard as it is for me that she’s gone, it’s even harder for her to accept that something terrible happened to me.
As much as I want to think about my life with her still here, and how full and wonderful it might be, it hasn’t done me any good. Accepting that this is what my life looks like now — mostly for worse — is the only way I can move forward.