Transcendent Kingdom(59)

Who was she then, I wondered, as Mrs. Palmer’s children and grandchildren folded my mother into their arms. My mother—who had never hugged us, even when we were little children presenting her with our scrapes and bruises, our wails—accepted the touch of these strangers, who, of course, weren’t strange to her. She spent more of her days with Mrs. Palmer than she had ever spent with us. And so I recognized, for perhaps the first time, that my mother wasn’t mine.



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    Most days I woke up, folded the bed back into the couch, and peeked in on my mother before rushing off to the lab. I had stopped trying to get her up, to make her the meals she might like, make a fuss. But then one day I poked my head into the room and there she was, pulling her pants on.

“Ma?”

“You said you would show me your lab,” she said plainly, as though we were living in a world of logic, where time moved in orderly, straightforward ways, instead of here, in the zigzagged upside-down world. I had asked my mom to come to the lab with me a week and a half before only to be greeted with a “maybe,” followed by eleven days of utter silence; why now?

I decided to live in her world.

Though the day was overcast, my mother kept squinting and shielding her eyes as we drove to campus. I made a mental note to open the blinds in the bedroom more often even if she objected, adding “not enough vitamin D” to my growing list of worries. The lab was empty, and I felt guilty by how relieved I was to not have to explain my mother, her slightly disheveled appearance, her slow-moving shuffle, to my colleagues. Aside from Katherine and Han, no one even knew that she was staying with me, let alone that she had hardly moved from my bed in weeks. I knew that my reluctancy to tell them went deeper than my natural inclination toward reticence, deeper than the typical embarrassment of introducing family members to friends. It was that I worked in a lab full of people who would see my mother, see her illness, and understand things about her that the general public never could. I didn’t want them to look at her and see a problem to be solved. I wanted them to see her at her best, but that meant that I was doing what everyone else did, trying to dress up depression, trying to hide it. For what? For whom?

    Had I known she was coming, I would have adjusted my schedule so that I’d have something cool to show her, a surgery or a training session. Instead, I showed her the behavioral testing chamber, now empty, the tools in my lab, unused.

“Where are the mice?” she asked.

I pulled out Han’s because they were closest to me. They were sleeping in their box, eyes closed, curled up, cute.

“Can I hold one?”

“They can get kind of jumpy, so you have to be careful, okay?”

She nodded, and I caught one and handed it to her.

She held the mouse in both hands, brushed her thumb over its head, and one of its eyes opened, rolled back as if to find her, before closing again. My mother laughed and my heart leapt at the sound.

“Do you hurt them?”

I had never fully explained my work to my mother. Whenever I did tell her about it, I used only the most scientific, most technical of terms. I never used the words “addiction” or “relapse,” I said “reward seeking” and “restraint.” I didn’t want her to think about Nana, to think about pain.

“We try to be as humane as possible and we don’t use animals if we can do things another way. But sometimes we do cause them some discomfort.”

She nodded and carefully placed the mouse back in its box, and I wondered what she was thinking. The day my mother had come home to find me and Nana tending to the baby bird, she told us that it wouldn’t live because we had touched it. She took it up in her hands as the two of us begged her not to hurt it. Finally, she just shrugged and gave it back to us. In Twi, she said, “There is no living thing on God’s Earth that doesn’t come to know pain sometime.”



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    In the final stage of Mahler’s separation-individuation theory of child development, babies begin to become aware of their own selves, and in so doing start to understand their mothers as individuals. My mother walking around my lab, observing things, showing tenderness toward a mouse when she rarely showed tenderness toward any living creature, all while in the depths of her depression, deepened this lesson for me. Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes. She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn’t me. I forget this and relearn it anew because it’s a lesson that doesn’t, that can’t, stick. I know her only as she is defined against me, in her role as my mother, so when I see her as herself, like when she gets catcalled on the street, there’s dissonance. When she wants for me things that I don’t want for myself—Christ, marriage, children—I am angry that she doesn’t understand me, doesn’t see me as my own, separate person, but that anger stems from the fact that I don’t see her that way either. I want her to know what I want the same way I know it, intimately, immediately. I want her to get well because I want her to get well, and isn’t that enough? My first thought, the year my brother died and my mother took to bed, was that I needed her to be mine again, a mother as I understood it. And when she didn’t get up, when she lay there day in and day out, wasting away, I was reminded that I didn’t know her, not wholly and completely. I would never know her.