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| NOT my mother (Photo credit: Sura Nualpradid http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1750) |
Two weeks after I married (at the tender age of 18), I was diagnosed with a bladder infection, strep throat, malnutrition, dehydration, and—of course—pregnancy. Unsurprisingly, I was hospitalized.
During this period, my mother was not speaking to me and had forbidden my father and brother J. to have any contact with me. While I lay in the emergency room waiting for a bed, a ruckus erupted on the other side of the curtain that separates patients from each other and the general public (it’s a well-known fact that flimsy curtains prevent the spread of disease). Recognizing one of the voices only added to my distress.
The curtains parted and in marched Dr. Mom, Medicine Woman, armed with—I’m not kidding—an oral thermometer, and followed by an ER doctor, nurse, and my father. Fleas (that’s the affectionate name I adopted for my mother after she was no longer in my life) approached my bedside, put the thermometer in my mouth, read my temperature, and marched out. No one spoke a word. It was all highly dramatic…or—more aptly—melodramatic.
I’m guessing that my mother-in-law, with whom my then-husband and I were living, had followed her conscience and informed my parents that I was in the ER. Fleas seized the opportunity to again cast herself in the starring role, this time as “concerned mama,” coerced my father into driving her to the hospital (after all, what good is a starring role if you don’t have an appreciative audience?), then made a scene featuring key phrases like my child and a mother’s right. Whatever. I was in the hospital for two weeks, but it would be nearly five months before I saw my parents again.
At the time it all seemed bizarre, but I was feverish and many things seemed bizarre. Looking back, I now realize it all was…well…bizarre.
xoxoxo
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