I’m sitting on one of the window seats in my parents’ bedroom. My mother has yet another headache and is lying in bed. She spends a lot of time in bed or on the couch. Her headaches are upsetting. I can’t talk to her when she has one. If I try to, she won’t respond to anything I say. And later, she won’t even remember that I spoke to her. I don’t understand why she can’t get better. I don’t understand why none of her doctors can figure out what’s wrong with her.
The house is quiet around us, unnaturally so. My siblings have learned that when Mom has a headache, they have to be on their best behavior. The older ones are probably out with friends. Perhaps my father has taken the younger ones off to play minigolf. I miss the old raucousness of the house when I was younger.
My mother is quiet too — perhaps she’s fallen asleep. My attention drifts to the scene outside the window. I see my mother’s station wagon in the driveway, my brothers’ and sisters’ balls and bikes in the yard, the two weeping willows, the spot where my mother’s vegetable garden used to be. I’m home from college for the weekend and would like to go visit some of my old friends, see who’s around. But I can’t bring myself to leave the room. I long for some connection with my mother. I want to tell her about the classes I’m taking this semester, the volunteer work I’m doing at the campus women’s center, and the new boy I just met.
I tried to talk to her last night. I’ve always been able to talk to her about anything, even sex. She’s never been judgemental. After all, she knows that I know that she was pregnant when she got married. But my mother is becoming less and less available as she gets sicker and sicker. Whenever I’m home for a visit, it’s clear that something is really wrong with her, that she’s suffering from more than headaches. She cries a lot. She’s kind of prickly. She’s distracted, unable to concentrate on our conversations. I want to confess to her that I’ve been drinking and getting high and sleeping around, that I’m all mixed up and need her advice. But for the first time in my life, she doesn’t seem to understand me, or worse, she doesn’t even seem interested in me. I’m hurt and bewildered by her coolness. Is she trying to push me away? Does she think I’m “launched” and no longer her concern?
I return my attention to the bed because I realize that my mother has rolled onto her back and has started talking. What is she saying? I listen carefully to her anguished voice as she whispers, to the ceiling as much as to me:
“I want to vanish. I want to disappear and be nowhere.”
As my mother finishes these words, it seems to me that the ceiling has flown away and the floor has collapsed under me. I feel as if the sky is exploding and the earth is giving way, and I have the sensation of falling, of swirling through black space at a frightening speed. When I land, when the room stops spinning, I seem to be inside a hole, a dark hole with no top or bottom, no way out. There’s no shelter here, no meaning, just coldness, darkness, in every direction, without end.
I’m glued to the window seat, cemented in place, unable to move even my tongue, as I search for some response to my mother’s words. The implication of what she has said is unspeakable, unthinkable. There’s simply no way to live without her defining presence.
“What about me?” I want to scream. “How can you wish to vanish and leave me all alone? Don’t you love me anymore?”
As the afternoon wears on, and then the weeks, months, and years, it seems that I will live in this terrifying hole for the rest of my life.
It doesn’t occur to me for a very long time that my mother has also fallen into a hole.