Maybe Now (Maybe #2)(54)

I love you.

Sydney.

I feel bad lying to him, because I’m not going home to do homework. I’m going home to change clothes.

This drive to San Antonio is long overdue.





My mother was a dramatic woman. Everything revolved around her, even when it wasn’t about her. She was the type of person who—when someone close to her would experience something bad in their lives—she would somehow relate it to her own life so that their tragedy could be her tragedy, too. Imagine what having a daughter with Cystic Fibrosis was like for her. It was her moment to soak up the sympathy—to make everyone feel sorry for her and the way her child turned out. My illness became more of a problem for her than it was for me.

But it didn’t last long, because she took a temporary position with her company in Paris, France, when I was three. She left me with my grandparents because it was “too cold” for me there, and it would be “too difficult” learning to navigate a new country with a sick child in tow. My father was never a part of my life, so that wasn’t an option. But my mother always promised she would one day take me back to Paris to live with her.

My grandparents had my mother at a very late age, and my mother had me in her late thirties. It was getting to the point that my grandparents could hardly care for themselves, much less a child. But my mother’s temporary position became permanent, and every year when she would come home to visit, she would promise me she’d take her back with me when the time was right. But her Christmas visits would always end on New Year’s Day, with her leaving to go back to Paris without me.

Maybe she did have intentions of taking me back with her, but after spending two weeks with me at my grandparents’ every year at Christmas, she would be reminded of what a huge responsibility I would be in her life. I used to think it was because she didn’t love me, but I remember the year I turned nine, I figured out that my illness is what she didn’t love about me. It wasn’t me.

I got the idea that if I could just convince her that I could take care of myself and that I didn’t need her help, she would take me with her and we could finally be together. In the weeks leading up to Christmas the year I turned nine, I was extremely cautious. I consumed all the vitamins I could get my hands on so that I wouldn’t catch a cold from my classmates. I used my vest twice as much as I was required to. I made sure I got eight hours of sleep every night. And even though Austin saw its first snow in years that winter, I refused to go outside to experience it because I was afraid I’d catch a cold and end up in the hospital during my mother’s visit.

When she arrived the week before Christmas, I was very careful never to cough in front of her. I wouldn’t take my medications in front of her. I did everything I could to appear like a vibrant, healthy child so that she’d have no choice but to see me as the child she’d always wished I was and that she would take me back to Paris with her. But that didn’t happen because on Christmas morning, I overheard her and my grandmother having an argument. My grandmother was telling my mother that she wanted her to move back to the States. She said she was concerned about what would happen to me when they died of old age. “What will Maggie do when we’re gone if you’re not around to care for her? You need to come back to the States and develop a better relationship with her.”

I will never forget the words my mother said to her in response.

“You’re worried about things that may never happen, Mother. Maggie will more than likely succumb to her illness before either of you succumb to old age.”

I was so shattered by her response to my grandmother that I ran back to my bedroom and refused to speak to her for the rest of her trip. In fact, that was the last time I ever spoke to her. She cut her trip short and left the day after Christmas.

She sort of faded out of my life after that. She called my grandmother to check in every month or so, but she never came back for Christmas, because every year I told my grandmother I didn’t want to see her. Then, when I was fourteen, my mother passed away. She was traveling from France to Brussels on a train for a business trip and suffered a massive heart attack. No one on the train even noticed she had died until three stations past her stop.

When I found out about her death, I went to my bedroom and cried. But I didn’t cry because she died. I cried because as dramatic as she was, she never made a dramatic attempt at winning my forgiveness. I think it’s because it was easier for her to live a life without me while I was mad at her than when I was missing her.

Two years after her passing, my grandmother died. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever endured. I still don’t think I’ve fully absorbed her passing. She loved me more than anyone had ever loved me, so when she died, I felt the absolute loss of that love.

And now my grandfather—the last of the people who raised me—has been put on hospice due to recently declined health, coupled with a case of pneumonia he’s too weak to fight. My grandfather will pass away any day now, and because of my Cystic Fibrosis and the nature of his illness, I am not allowed to see him and tell him goodbye. He’ll likely die sometime this week, and just like my grandmother feared, they’ll all be gone and I’ll be all alone.

I guess my mother was wrong about me succumbing to my illness before them. I’ll outlive them all.

I know my experience with my mother hinders all my other relationships. It’s hard for me to fathom that someone else could love me despite my illness, when my own mother wasn’t even able to do that.