"She came to care for me, a daughter only several days out of her fourth breast cancer surgery, a daughter who had never liked being nurtured even as a small child. "
Mother/Daughter ~
By Meredith Laskow
M
y mother just left on a plane to New York, after two weeks of staying at my house. For the first time in memory, we did not scream, we did not fight, we did not call each other names. We maintained a respectful distance from each other’s emotions, careful not to trample fields where only bitterness had grown before.
She came to care for me, a daughter only several days out of her fourth breast cancer surgery, a daughter who had never liked being nurtured even as a small child. She came to be a mother to a daughter who had moved three thousand miles away to escape an overprotective, nagging, and unaccepting family; I tried to be a daughter to the woman who never quite understood her oldest child.
My worst fears did not materialize — pressure points that I expected to escalate into full-blown wars were mentioned quietly and then dropped. Our lifetime fight could not endure under the weight of my disease, as if the cancer had somehow obliterated forty-eight years of acrimony
.
We saw three plays together, I worked, she washed dishes. She ate strange meals and did not complain once that her grown daughter could neither cook nor clean. We did not bring up past injustices or open old wounds. She didn’t mention miracle cures that dangled like invisible rainbows in her previous phone calls and letters.
Forty-eight years of tears and bitterness, and we were trying to start again. We were seeking to forge an emotional bond where only blood had existed previously; we attempted to repair a relationship which we both had run from in the past. Not much was said and very little was done but in the end I understood: my mother came because she loved me and she did not want me to die. She would be there for me, even if neither of us had been there before.
First Published at Moondance.org.
Meredith Karen Laskow was a prolific writer in her youth, but stopped writing completely for twelve years, until she was diagnosed with breast cancer on May 19, 1998, two days before her 48th birthday. Her essays and poetry have appeared in 87 publications,
including 7 national-level anthologies (and her mother is infinitely
impressed that the poems are sometimes as close as 10 pages away from
stuff "written by famous people.") Ms. Laskow has been making jewelry and art since her childhood
"sometime back in the Ice Ages." She sells her creations at craft
fairs, galleries, and her website www.meredithbead.com, or email her at meredithbead@netzero.net
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