Clareified

I have always had a (probably) unhealthy obsession with death. I usually chalk it up to the fact that when your whole family is one person, you tend to worry about death. A lot. When I was little I used to sneak into my mom’s room and hold a compact mirror under her nose to make sure she was breathing. When I learned First Aid in Girl Scouts, I upgraded to checking her temperature and pulse. It was not uncommon for her to wake in the middle of the night to find me standing over her bed, with my index and middle finger on the side of her neck, counting her heart rate.
“Girl! You scared me half to death.”
“I was making sure you’re alive.”
“Look, if I die, I will let you know. Now, go back to bed.”
It is the source of one of our longest-running bits.
“Mommy, are you dead?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
There were always contingency plans, of course. When my mom was hospitalized when I was four, I was to be shipped off to Panama to be raised by my grandparents and the other parentless cousins. When she took ill when I was nine, it was decided that I should live with my aunt in Brooklyn and her three ne’er do well offspring. At fourteen, when she contracted an infection from an improperly sterilized instrument during a routine corrective surgery, my high school English teacher and his wife offered to be my guardians if she didn’t make it.
The thing about all these plans that I never bothered to mention to anyone, was that I had no intention of following any of them. Well, okay, I can’t really speak for my four-year-old self, but if my mom had died when I was nine or fourteen, my plan was simple. I would get dressed in whatever hideous dress and shoes my aunt picked out for me, sit quietly through the wake and burial and then I would sit by my mother’s grave until she came back to get me.
Because she would.
First off, she knows how much I hate wearing dresses and second, I would most certainly catch my death sitting out there all night; no way would she stand for that.
I would sit, she would come, I would get my ass kicked for getting mud on my dress, there would be soup and I would be put to bed.
As the now rational adult that I am, I’ve learned to see the value in wider familial networks of fathers and siblings and grandparents. But as the child of one Joyce Summers, I never once felt like I was missing anything.
My mom had been told that she couldn’t have any children of her own. Two years before I was born, she and my father spent ten months working on an adoption of a little boy which fell through at the last minute – one of those parentless cousins my grandparents would eventually raise. I was quite literally her miracle and she took very good care of me. She paid a neighbor girl to comb my hair, when her own repeated tries resulted in unruly braids standing at unsightly angles around my head. I had “school sneakers” and “play sneakers” – though she drew the line at “church sneakers” —not that I didn’t try. My every success, from learning to walk (at the absurdly late age of two) or saying my first words (at the absurdly early age of nine months) (really, who we are as people is programmed into us very very early) or coming home from school with all the clothes, clips and school supplies I left with – was celebrated with a trip to the Sears photographer. I have pictures of me with no teeth, and two teeth, two teeth missing, first communion, confirmation, a Saturday when it was raining and I was bored. Not that I was spoiled. Far from it. My mother imagined things for me that to this day I have no idea how on earth she came up with it.
She pushed me to do ballet and gymnastics, she pushed me into the most advanced academic programs she could find, I had to excel at Sunday School and Girl Scouts and never once did she ever suggest to me that these were anything but ordinary things that any child who wasn’t retarded easily did every day, without complaint.
I remember when I was a teenager, hearing my mother and my aunt talk about my elementary school aged cousin. My aunt was complaining that her son wasn’t doing his homework and how could she motivate him and my mother just looked at her and said “motivate? You make him do his fucking homework.”
That was that.
I may have been her miracle child, but she never let me get away with a single thing. A’s should be A pluses, extra credit was always to be completed and that was just the bare minimum.
My mom also taught me how to fight (I guess she could tell that a lazy, talkative smartass might get into trouble now and then.) To this day, one of the things I can clearly remember my mom telling me is “if you come home with a bruise on your face, you’d better have sent the other kid home with two.” (My mom’s advice on fighting groups of more than two: “Look, you’re going to lose, but you want to get hold of one and just fuck him up good.” Yeah…umm…New York City public schools in the 80s were tough.)
My mom practiced every line for every school play with me, she was always my first audience for my stories or my speeches and she wasn’t an easy audience either. She’d rebut my speeches with “so?” or “big deal?” and then when I’d say “No, you can’t just say so, you have to have an argument, mommy. Reasons,” she’d look at me and say “so, if the other team gets up and says “so,” what are you going to do? Cry?”
(Well, frankly, yes. So’s their face.)
She never let me win any game we ever played, in fact, she’d insist that she win or else she wouldn’t play anymore. I used to think she had superpowers because there were days she’d just look at me and say “what did you do?” Or “Dawn, if you tell me now before I find out, I’ll go easier on you.”
That was always a vicious lie. Fool me once…okay, she fooled me lots. I never had a “curfew” – but I never went anywhere. I never had a bedtime, but I was up at 5:45 every morning without fail. I watched as much TV as I wanted, but never came home with anything but the best grades in everything except well, behavior and self-control. And hey, whose fault was it that a nine-year-old knows how to fight groups of two or more?
I didn’t come from a single parent household; I came from an uberparent household. Even now, whenever someone bothers me, my first instinct is to tell my mommy on them. The contractor that redecorated my kitchen would be all “okay, I’ll be there tomorrow, please, no need to have your mother call me.”
And I would say “okay, but if you’re not here by 2 p.m., I’m telling.”
It’s quite clear by her constant reminders that I need to buy food for my house, run an iron across my clothes every now and then and “for the love of God do something with that hair of yours,” that my mom still sees me as her singular responsibility. She is my mother. And these past few months, I’ve come to realize that I am still very much her child.
In late March my mother was diagnosed with congestive heart failure caused by cardiomyopathy and aortic stenosis or the cardiomyopathy and aortic stenosis caused the congestive heart failure. That my mom was telling me this information over the phone, was the beginning of my cardiac education. Congestive heart failure isn’t actually as fatal as it sounds. Really it’s congestive heart failing. Like me in advanced calculus in ninth grade. Her heart’s pulling around a D-. We just came up with that joke last week. Actually, the last few week’s have been the best – or at least way better than the first couple of months of mad freak out panic and me watching Barbara Hershey in ‘Beaches’ die from cardiomyopathy on a replay loop from every TV in my apartment.
“Can I bring my cat?”
“You can bring any old thing you want.”
Cue the waterworks.
Seriously. Without fail.
When I was in high school, my friend Andy would just say the words “Can I bring my cat?” and it would set me off. He would laugh. And then I would fire a rubber band into his face and he would cry. And then I would laugh.
I think he’s a priest now.
Obviously, that movie has always touched a nerve. A little girl left with no parents when her single mom dies. Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude.
That. Could. Be. Gulp. ME. And just as quickly as I would make the successive connections that I was not a cute little white freckled girl with a rock star for a godmother, I would just start to cry.
She has excellent insurance and good doctors who have all been warned that I am a lawyer — and since I go with her to all her doctor’s appointments in the middle of the weekday, they know I am a lawyer with lots of free time. “Look, go out with your friends, live your life,” she’d say to my grim visage hovering around her living room, her modern day version of “if I die, I’ll let you know.”
She encouraged me to go to my friend’s wedding in Vegas, take a few days, enjoy myself. And when she called me in Vegas last week to say that the doctor decided to schedule her for the first surgery and I’d have to take her in for pre-operative testing and x-rays on July 8, she said it with the “oh, not on your birthday,” tone that she always used if it rained on my birthday or if the apartment sprang a leak from somewhere or if the Air Conditioner crapped out.
“I asked if we could do it the following week, but…”
“Are you crazy woman? I’ll come back right now if the doctor says so, turns out the stupid wedding only lasted six levels into day one!”
“What?”
“Um…nothing…it’s hot here. I’m going inside now.”
I got to East Coco Beach at dawn this morning. She was waiting for me with three boxes of presents and said I could come back for the rest later. “Oh, a portable grill and beach umbrella set?! Yaaay!” “For when you go to the beach!”
Right. Of course.
We got to the hospital at seven a.m. I did my usual not sleeping at all the night before so I would make sure that I was up in time.
We checked in, filled out the forms and waited.
I took a sip of coffee and burned my lip. She rolled her eyes “take off the lid and blow, Dawn.”
I did as I was told and we waited some more.
“Hey,” I said, a big grin spreading on my face, “this is the first time you and I have been in a hospital together on July 8th in 33 years! Have I changed much?”
She smiled and shook her head.
“How do you think of things like that?”
I shrugged.
Guess this is no time to tell her about my whole sitting in the cemetery until she comes back plan in case she has any crazy notions about leaving me anytime soon.

This entry was posted by Dawn Summers on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.