My Mother

My mom has always been somewhat of a magical figure to me. As a child I clung to her like moss to a tree. Forever clamped to a leg or an arm or shopping cart even, if she was pushing. I remember the extreme fear I had of losing her in the grocery store. Because, without her the world was a giant scary place full of tall strangers. But with her the world was safe and wonderful.
When our family lived in Corpus Christi, we used to camp on the beach near our home on the base. We would wake up and climb out of our child size tent to have adventures strutting across the endless sand. We would find hermit crabs who lived up very much to their name. They hid determinedly in their protective shells.  Desperate to see what they really looked like, we would bring them to our mother. She would take their rounded shells into her small hands and coo to them until their little blue and green eyes poked out on their stalks to find the source of that lovely sound.
As I grew older my mother changed and grew in my eyes. Slowly she shed her fairy wings and began to take on human form. When I was in middle school her spine began to shoot pain throughout the rest of her body. For months my constant, long-suffering mother paled in pain and endured ridiculous medical efforts to ease her suffering. They shocked her back with electric sticky pads. They sent her to chiropractors that hurt more than helped. Until finally the jig was up and they had no choice but to put her into surgery. They opened her up and put a titanium disc into her spine, where disease and malformation had rubbed away at her bone and nerve. That week my father took my siblings and me to her recovery room. As I looked at my beautiful mother, pale and weak, the spell was forever broken. Despite her now super human spine and the wonder woman body brace she had to wear, my mother was revealed as what she had been all along: a finite, fragile human.
Around the same time my mother developed another condition called gastritis. Without warning it would be triggered, and the lining of her stomach felt like it was on fire for hours. But she never sat or laid down for long when these episodes hit. As I got ready for bed on these nights, I would hear the sound of her little feet bustling from room to room, cleaning everything. I would fall asleep to the hum of the vacuum after kissing my mom's pained but calm face goodnight, seeing all the fatigue and restraint swirling back and forth in her green eyes. One morning after one of her most painful and long nights, I woke up to our very tidy house and began to look for my mother. I walked into her room, then into her bathroom, then into her secret room. (This was connected to the back of her closet). I looked for her and found freshly painted on the wall, a bouquet of flowers. Sunflowers and bluebonnets danced happily in the wake of hours and hours of pain. Never hinting to the uninformed viewer of their tumultuous origin story.