Helping her live through a painful illness has somehow has brought us closer together
Except she didn’t die. Straight to the emergency room, into a hospital bed, countless machines hooked up to her, each thin wire a tentative hold keeping her with us. She was barely even a whisper of life, but she didn’t die. The coming months and years were filled with quite a few more trips to the emergency room, hospital visits, consults with specialists, myriad prescriptions, and moments that stretched out like oceans, drowning me in my own fear.
Nineteen years after her illness — the result of a terrible pancreas infection that nearly destroyed every organ in her body — my mom is still alive. However, the effects of that time remain. She is on medication she will have to take for the rest of her life. She’ll have flare-ups and bad moments; certain foods will make her sick sometimes. She has twice-yearly checkups with her doctor to do a battery of tests to make sure the pain meds she’s on haven’t negatively affected her organs in other ways.
I have never written about how my mom’s sickness has impacted me. But its roots have spread thick and deep into me. It has been the cause of deep anxiety surrounding my mom’s health and, by extension, my life. I have been mourning and preparing to mourn my mother’s death for almost as long as I can remember.
What does that do to a child? What does it take from them? It takes away the ability to see an option beyond catastrophe. It disintegrates you from the inside out. Your ability to steel yourself in the face of hardship, the very thing that has carried you through, is now what’s destroying you. Even steel has a melting point.
As the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, I watched how my mom, a black woman, seamlessly danced through everything life threw at her. She created abundance out of scarcity. She went from the backbreaking work of cleaning hotel rooms to the spirit-breaking work of raising a black daughter in a world totally foreign and separate from the one she grew up in. After she became ill, I took over. I never saw my mom take a break in her life, so how could I?
Taking care of myself meant making sure I was out of the way. And I was good at it.
I wasn’t introduced to the idea of self-care until well into adulthood. The concept of dedicating time to solely taking care of yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually was entirely foreign to me. From age 11 until my mid-twenties, my focus was on taking care of my parents. It was all I knew. Taking care of myself, to me, meant making sure I did well in school and that I wasn’t an additional stress for my dad. I never really had a “rebellious teenager phase” because, quite honestly, I didn’t feel like our home had the emotional bandwidth for it. Once I was old enough, I began working, and whatever money I made I gave to my dad to help ease the financial burden of suddenly becoming a single-income household. I cooked meals, cleaned the house, and did all my chores faithfully and silently. Taking care of myself meant making sure I was out of the way. And I was good at it.
My mom would get a cold, and I’d panic. She’d complain of a headache for a couple days, and my imagination would run amok, going through a never-ending, torturous Rolodex of worst-case scenarios. I knew this wasn’t sustainable for much longer. I had to treat the wound directly — I needed to repair my relationship with my mom. It wasn’t broken in the typical sense that we didn’t get along or that we weren’t close. No, the original mother-daughter relationship had been transformed to patient-caregiver, and it had never reverted to its original form.
It wasn’t until I realized I was genuinely struggling with my own anxiety that I knew I needed to change something. Believing this was beyond my scope of knowledge and skills, the first item on my agenda was to find a therapist I felt comfortable with. When I finally found her, she helped me unpack my exhausting emotions and thoughts surrounding my mom. I was realistic in my goals; I knew I would probably always feel some base level of anxiety about my mom’s health. But I just wanted to get to a place where it didn’t smother my entire life. I wanted to reach a point where I could acknowledge the pain and anxiety that lived in me, sit with it, and then let it go.
If I could get back to loving my mom instead of treating my patient — a task I was never qualified for in the first place — maybe I could undo some of the pain that built up like plaque in my insides. I had no idea if it would work, but I couldn’t risk not trying. This would mean dredging up feelings and memories that neither I nor my mom particularly wanted to revisit. It meant confronting ugly feelings I kept hidden from my family and certainly from myself. Feelings like resentment for my mom that her sickness had borrowed against my childhood and time stolen from me that I could not get back. In one particularly rough therapy session, I remember being ashamed the first time I actually let myself think and work through these emotions: “How could someone feel like this about their mother? She didn’t ask for this,” I asked. My therapist replied, “Gloria, give yourself a break — neither did you.”
We told stories of our pain and shared how we coped and where we failed.
In reacquainting myself with my beloved mom and learning again how to love her the way I was born to, I learned how to love myself; my true self-care work had begun. For the first time, I asked her about the emotions she still carried from her sickness. She told stories of rage at God and the universe, of her endless “why me” moments. She spoke softly about the immense guilt she felt and still feels. How she felt like she had failed me and how sorry she was that so much of my growing into a black woman was infused with pain. How she never imagined that she would add to the already long list of traumas black girls face in this world. We told stories of our pain and shared how we coped and where we failed.
Black women are nothing if not a community, and it was in these together moments that my mom and I became that for each other. We recognized and honored the pain we each held and gave each other permission to let it go. For so many years, I lived with anxiety and stresses that a child should never have to take on. But I had, so what then? Self-care was absolutely necessary, but any previous attempts at it had been hollow until I let go of the hurt that came with taking care of a sick parent. In letting her go as a patient, I got my mama back.
With our spirits healed, we have found a tenderness in our relationship that allows us to walk through life together no longer terrified of it. We go for walks. We have our own two-person book club. We watch YouTube beauty tutorials, and we get our nails done. We laugh.
This blog was written by Gloria Alamrew who is an Edmonton-based writer. She writes about all things that centre around Blackness, culture, and the myriad ways they intersect.