A crow squawks, “Hear that? Those are my children.” my mom says from her bed in the living room of a Seattle apartment. My little sister tells me my mom feeds the crows peanuts from the window next to her bed. That she dislodges the window screen to do it.
I am up here for the first time in my life. My mom and little sister moved here six months ago. My mom found out she had breast cancer two months ago. Stage 0, the best of the worst case. She had a double mastectomy yesterday. I drove her home today, “Home sweet home.” she said when she climbed into bed, a dozen pillows awaiting her.
The surgery went well. “What size breast did they give me?” she asked not long after we were able to see her.
We were talking about moms on the phone and I told my girlfriend my mom gives me creativity. That when I am shut off toward her, it shuts me off from a source of chaos and wonder that has fostered me in many ways. It’s amazing to feel so many ways toward a person as if splintered through a prism of thousands of sides existing in different times.
My upbringing was strange and chaotic and full of a lot of dramatics masquerading as love and a lot of love true to itself as simple love. My upbringing was at the four hands of two separate people doing the best they could with themselves as they were giants in my mind and sorcerers in my heart. Gone and present shifting and rarely interlocking and gone and present.
And now here I am drawing closer toward middle age while watching my mother sleep in an apartment near a city I don’t know while feeling full of despair about my lifelong pursuits and a relentless gnawing energy toward them anyway. I am talking about art or the bastardized versions of the art that I practice or don’t.
When my mom got out of surgery she said her “throat was dry like the frickin Sahara desert.” When my dad got out of surgery three years ago he took all the cords and tubes in front of him and he said “spaghetti.” When my mom got out of surgery she mentioned my father was funny. It was one of two things both my parents would agree about of my father, that he was funny and that he was great at putting in an I.V.
Drugged, before her surgery yesterday morning sitting before me in a pre-surgery room with no cell phone service my mom told me it wasn’t just selfishness that informed her reasoning for having six kids it was also that she wanted to make us out of love and joy.
-Josh Turek
feb 28, 2018
