Four Eyes, page 6
When my mom got pregnant with me in 1981, she developed gestational diabetes that never went away. This became her secret to carry, and a space to hold the shame at what this meant about her weight, her worth, and her willpower. Neither Mat nor I knew she was diabetic until we were in high school ourselves. The power of this secret ate away at her slowly, as her shame seed sprouted thick roots and blossomed in her self-esteem. Weight was always a struggle for my mom—another gift she passed my way. Yet along with the struggle of weight fluctuation, the unseen heaviness of what that meant about one’s character and soul became the more damaging struggle. This, however, was something we did not talk about.
My mom and Patti were two years apart in age, but three in school. Janet was two years younger than Patti, and five years apart from my mom in school. The age differences were just enough that my mom never went to high school with her sisters, and she experienced a lot of her shame alone. The class ring reveal led my mom to feel slightly different from them, though she didn’t let that get in the way of being there for her sisters as they grew up. Though they each developed in their unique ways, they all shared many things, including clothes and, often, hairstyles.
The girls’ hairstyles told the story of the times, and all of them vacillated through various versions of long hair, shorter pixie cuts, and perms. So many perms. My mom ended up with a short, wavy brown/blondish hairstyle for most of her adulthood and my Aunt Patti with mostly medium-length straight hair with an occasional perm thrown in. My Aunt Janet stayed true to the medium-length perm for as long as I can remember.
The perm lineage was also passed my way. After a full day of what I remember as actual torture sitting in a chair in my kitchen growing up, my grandma would remove the soaking-wet cotton strip around my head that was holding the home permanent solution and all the rollers in, wash my still-rollered hair in the sink (the most torturous part), and then slowly free me back to being a kid by unrolling each roller and paper wrapper one by one, clinking them into the sink. I was always wiggly and cold, and my grandma was so patient, though I am pretty sure she was as annoyed as she was patient. My perms inducted me into the family forever, and you could always find me in a crowd due to the number of inches my curls soared atop my head.
My grandma sewed all the girls’ clothes until well into high school, which wasn’t as cool for them then as it might be now. My mom also learned to sew and became my lifelong pants hemmer, as pants were always too long for my short legs.
Tradition continued as my mom enrolled me in sewing class as a kid. I remember being so proud of my created wardrobe, the best of the early ’90s gifting me a geometric black-and-white pattern with puffy hot pink flamingos that I made into shorts and a shirt. I was in my creative haven and took to sewing as often as I could. At the end of the class, there was even a fashion show that I was invited to walk in. I chose a sensible puppies nightgown, obviously, as the ten-going-on-forty-two-year-old that I was. I remember walking up and down that runway hugging my stuffed dog and best friend, Mutsy, for all she was worth. Though my mom’s experience with sewing had been markedly different, her relaying the skill to me replaced some of the joy it had lacked for her.
As the oldest, my mom was a natural born trailblazer. After college, she left home to live with her aunt and uncle, my grandma’s sister and husband, in Washington DC. They had three boys, who my mom helped care for while job searching. She eventually landed her first teaching job in Falls Church, Virginia where she met Carol.
Carol was her oldest friend, and she became the reason we road-tripped to Colorado. My mom was ever the explorer and credits this time in her life with the birth of her inner adventure seeker. Her drive to see the world and find her place in it led her on many exciting adventures, not the least of which ended in her meeting my dad in the Badlands of South Dakota when they both happened to be on road trips from Michigan.
“Hi, Aunt Janet,” I said as she came inside for some more water. I hugged her and asked about their trip and gave her the update, which, by now, was fairly rote behavior. Some days, it seemed as though I could share without ever nearing a feeling, while others were so full of feelings that I could barely speak. Today was one of the former days. It felt like roulette each morning, never knowing how I was going to feel. These days were a bit surreal, though. I often questioned how I could function and relay the facts if I was feeling everything all of the time, so I was grateful that today, nothing felt real, even my own skin. I was floating.
CHAPTER 18
May 15, 2012, 12:30 P.M.
MY MOM WAS awake when we got to the hospital—my aunts, my uncle, Dad, and me. We led them down our familiar route, chiming “second floor” with the elevator as we took the familiar turns to the Cardiac ICU in stride.
“Sherri, it’s so good to see you!” my aunts exclaimed as they hurriedly entered my mom’s hospital room and began to engage with her. With the peg tube in, my mom was able to sustain sufficient food and nutrients to regain some strength and be able to spend less time on the ventilator and more time awake. She was there, silently nodding and more alert than I had seen her in days. She was still being treated for pneumonia and the lethargic beating of her heart and was still connected to a jungle of tubes. In addition, this time, she could no longer speak.
My aunts continued to talk to my mom and interpret her answers as they processed witnessing their older sister incapacitated. With the trach in, another version of communication had suddenly joined our family, and no one was really ready.
CHAPTER 19
May 16, 2012, 2:36 P.M.
“LISH, IS YOUR mom diabetic?” my Aunt Patti asked over the phone.
My head swirled with panic, a response that had been ingrained in me since Mat and I found out my mom was diabetic, and our family had erupted. I didn’t know how to answer my aunt.
“Um …,” I started before flashing back to that hard memory.
It was the summer before my sophomore and Mat’s senior year of high school. He had just returned from a camping trip to Colorado with a youth group, where he’d fainted and described having seizure-like muscle spasms and not being able to respond while hiking up a mountain. He was terrified and didn’t come out of it until someone gave him some hard candy. When he got home, he accidentally walked in on my mom giving herself insulin and decided to confront her about what was going on. We had suspected this for years and it wasn’t a big deal to us, but now that Mat had experienced a health incident involving blood sugar levels, it would be helpful to know any medical details that could affect us.
This was not, however, how my mom received the news. Her feelings cocktail of mortification, hurt, disappointment, and shame all came out in pure rage, and she didn’t talk to Mat or me for hours now that we knew her secret. The shame seed was deeply grounded. It got so bad that I took off on my bike for a few hours until Mat came to find me to bring me home for a family meeting. A shame seed of my own began to take root, as I believed my mom’s anger was mine to hold.
My dad facilitated the meeting; my mom was so impacted that she could not even talk or barely look at us. She assumed that we had known for years and was convinced that we had shared her most shameful detail with everyone we knew, especially her family, when she already felt scrutinized for her weight by her parents. We denied this, but she remained angry and didn’t believe us. My dad redirected her into sharing how she wanted us to hold this information moving forward.
“This is no one else’s business but mine, and you never get to share this with anyone, especially Grandma and Grandpa,” she told us, steeled and prickly. “I am a very private person, and this doesn’t get to come out.”
I had never seen my mom cry so much. It took her a week before she started to talk and act like my mom again. As my dad wrapped up one of the most awkward conversations, I had ever been a part of, he added one last detail about himself that sent Mat and me into shock. He revealed that he was also diabetic and had developed it around the same time as my mom.
I remember Mat and I looking at each other in disbelief. “What?!” was the general go-to response for a while as we synthesized this information. My dad asked us to keep his information private as well, and I left that conversation feeling both sad that they felt so ashamed about their medical condition and angry that it had taken Mat almost dying on a mountain to reveal that important information to us, their children, who could also be impacted.
As I processed this event over the years, one thing was clear among all the confusion: I was not to tell anyone, ever.
“The nurse came in with insulin, Lish, and I just wondered. How long has she been getting insulin?” my aunt asked.
My mouth had gone dry, and I tried to swallow all the anxiety pulsating through my body.
“Yes,” I started. “She has diabetes and has since she had me. My dad has it too,” I spit out quickly, watching for impending lightning bolts to strike at any moment.
“Really?” my aunt asked, incredulously. “And we never knew?”
I explained the shame seed to her, and their request for privacy about this as we processed. I was only half present, though, as I was thinking about how my mom would react to her sister now knowing her deepest, darkest secret. I had done it. The one thing I was never supposed to say out loud to anyone. I felt the fear of my fourteen-year-old-self course through me as though no time had passed at all.
I called my dad to nervously tell him of the news, and my inner fourteen-year-old had a slight reprieve as he sighed and said, “Well, they were bound to find out at some point through this. Diabetes is a huge reason she’s in this position to begin with. It’s okay, and there’s no reason to hide it anymore. I’m not hiding mine, either.”
I let out a huge sigh of relief as I said, “Good, because I told Aunt Patti you had it too.”
“There’s nothing more to hide,” my dad reassured me. “It just is.”
“I didn’t ask her not to tell Mom, so I’m afraid Mom is going to be really upset again,” I continued.
“I’ll talk with her and let her know. And if she’s mad, she’s mad.”
My fourteen-year-old-self remembered what this uncertainty was like and took over.
“That’s terrifying, Dad,” I said. “She’s going to be really mad at me.”
“Nah, she won’t,” he said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Now that she sees the damage diabetes has caused, she knows it was just a matter of time before they found out. It’s okay.”
I wrapped my arms around myself in a giant bear hug to calm down. Taking a few deep breaths, I chose to believe him.
CHAPTER 20
May 18, 2012, 5:32 P.M.
OVER THE WEEK that my aunts and uncle were in town, we all slowly began learning my mom’s signals, needs, and wants through pointing, guessing, trial and error–ing, and a large ongoing game of charades. The whole process brought levity, connection, laughter, and some frustration to everyone, though by the end, we began to get it down. Our tiredness was worth it.
Luckily, with all the current happenings, my aunts and uncle learning of my mom’s diabetes was nothing more than a slightly embarrassing blip for her on her current illness trajectory. I was beyond relieved. I would still clam up whenever a nurse made a comment about her diabetes when my aunts and uncle were in the room, bracing for the aftermath, but it never came. Privacy and modesty were a privilege at this point, one my mom had lost when her life was on the line. I was grateful that she was open to it, though it was still rarely spoken about.
My dad told me that she had taken the news well when he told her.
“Sher, your sisters and Jerry know about our diabetes,” he told her one afternoon as she was awake and looking out the window.
She nodded in return and offered a shrug, as if to say, “Oh, well.”
“It’s not worth hiding anymore,” he continued.
My mom apparently agreed with a slight nod of her head.
My family took to navigating this fact about my parents with ease and kindness, and it was only brought up when absolutely necessary. Once I heard this was their response, my inner fourteen-year-old was finally able to lower her shoulders after all these years. She was still jumpy, though.
We took turns sitting with my mom, all in shifts. It was a relief to get some sleep in the mornings, as my aunts and uncle were usually up and still functioning on EST. They took the morning shifts, and my dad and I took the late shifts. This was unlike any previous family gathering we had ever experienced. Mat would join after work when he could, and he brought Brooks as often as possible. My mom lit up every time she saw him, and he would usually bring “Gamma” a recent piece of his coloring artwork for her wall. They were both extremely pleased.
There was an underlying parallel process happening for me, as I was simultaneously present with my mom undergoing so many changes while also in grad school learning about the best ways to connect with people, all people. People of different backgrounds, abilities, ethnicities, races, faiths, gender identities, sexual orientations, beliefs, value systems, and cultural identities. Seeing people as versions of their own Truths and the experts on themselves left space for me to learn to check my biases at the door when interacting with anyone whose life experiences had molded them into very different expressions of my Truth.
Given this fuel, I began to view my mom as a new version of herself and tried to remove myself from everything I had known about her while she was relearning everything herself. This was difficult and exhilarating at the same time. I began looking through a clinical set of glasses as well as a family pair. In clinical mode, I found great space in which to be creative with my interactions with her, and space to practice some of the skills I continued to learn in school that built rapport and relationship with someone by meeting them where they were at. When I was in daughter mode, it was easier to get frustrated at things being so drastically different than they used to be. I tried to straddle the line in hopes of a balance, though that proved much more of a challenge than I thought.
“Mom, school has been interesting lately,” I started one day, letting her know my latest learnings.
She nodded as I spoke, staring at the ceiling. A tear slipped out of her eye a few sentences later, and I asked what was wrong. She pointed to her back and tried to roll over onto her side. It was her bedsore. I got the nurse, and she was rotated and given some more pain meds before falling asleep.
My daughter lens was cracked, and to prevent my taking the hurt personally, my clinical lens took over. She wasn’t able to meet me where I was anymore, at least not right now, and needed me to meet her where she was instead. The balancing act was nearly impossible, and it gradually shifted more and more into mostly clinical view. I learned to reserve my details for my dad, and even then, it was increasingly more difficult to talk about anything good in my life when their lives were so hard right now.
I grieved this part of the relationship with my mom that no longer afforded her the ability to listen to my details or be a supportive ear. And I knew I wasn’t the only one. The chasm between “normal life” and her life was drastic, and it was growing increasingly more difficult for her to relate to others.
She began pointing more often to communicate, and I began to learn her language. Everything was about her pain. I felt so selfish, trying to still interact with my mom as if she were the same as she used to be. As if she weren’t compromised. But she was, and daughter mode was getting less and less comfortable with showing up. My survivor’s guilt was off the charts. I was reminded of this every time I tried to bring up my life or details and she met me with a request for water, more pain meds, tears, or falling asleep. I totally got it, and slowly put my daughter self away on a shelf in service of helping my mom stabilize. Daughter mode could come back down later. I hoped.
CHAPTER 21
May 21, 2012, 12:13 P.M.
“HI, SHERRI,” CAME the soothing voice of the speech-language pathologist. “How are we today?” she questioned as my mom’s eyes fluttered open.
My mom waved her hand at her and shrugged.
“My name is Sarah, and I am here to help you work up to talking with your trach in over the next few days,” she said, pulling up a chair next to the bed. She was a petite woman in her thirties with long, curly blonde hair and a very caring tone. “How does that sound?” she asked my mom while looking at the ventilator settings.
My mom nodded in agreement.
“Well, I see Physical Therapy was here earlier,” she said, noting the large plastic sewing needle threaded with yarn and halfway woven into a stuffed bear with large precut holes in it for children to learn how to sew. That made quite the statement, as my mom was an excellent seamstress.
I noted to myself how weird it was to see my mom needing to relearn basic motor skills. She hadn’t had a stroke, yet she was very swollen from the pneumonia, all the medications she was on for various things, and her open-heart surgery. She wore a pair of fingertip-less compression gloves that her fingers stuck out of as if reaching for their own freedom. Motor skills, walking, talking, wow, I said to myself as I continued to pay attention to Sarah. Clinical eyes on.
“We’re going to start by disconnecting the tube connected to the ventilator and capping your trach with this valve so you can breathe through your nose and mouth and not need the machine to do it for you,” she said as she looked at my mom for her approval. My mom consented through frightened eyes.
Sarah began to unhook the tube and, before my mom could react, swiftly capped the hole, forcing my mom to breathe in through her nose and mouth. She transitioned with no problem.
