The Family Estranged
“Hello?”
“Marley? It's Matt... have you heard yet?”
His words deafened me and my heart sunk as the familiar scenario I had imagined popped in to my head. The sorrow I had feared came to life within the tears welling in my eyes. Mom had collapsed at work overnight and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. She was in Little Rock, an hour away from Drew and I, and six hours away from Matt. We had seen each other before this when we co-signed together to bail Drew out of jail a couple months prior. The state-wide scandal of the fired jailer made me fear for Drew's life, my conscience out-weighed my wanted disdain, and the bondsman took the first awkward photo of mother and daughter together in well over three years.
“Is she okay? What happened? Is she awake? Can she talk?”
“They think it may be her heart. She was resting last I checked. Mardy and Ken have her phone.”
“Okay. I'll text them on her phone and see what's going on then.” I said.
Mardy and I despise each other. In the silent sort of way where the hate isn't manifested by any one particular event. It's more like a series of little events that have ever-so-slightly swayed our opinions of each other, to each our own way, bit by bit over the years. With my adolescence spent defending his honor, I discovered in adulthood he actually lacked any semblance of honor. (This is much the same opinion I have of my Mom.) And with my honor being an enigma to him, his logic dictates it must be a facade.
This is Marley. How is Mom?
What hospital is she in?
They are doing a stress test on her this morning.
They are not sure it it's a blockage or a small heart attack.
Should I come?
If you come, you can't bring Drew at all. She can't handle it.
What about the girls? Is she in the ICU?
The girls are too young to visit the ICU.
You have to be as nice as you can.
Who the hell is this??
I'm the only one in this family perfectly capable of
biting my tongue and setting shit aside when something
bigger is at stake. Drew should be able to see her.
If she were to pass and he didn't get to see her first,
it would be his undoing.
She didn't want either one of you two to come...
It was Ken and I that did want for you and the girls to come.
I burst into tears. Oh, what pain is this that I never anticipated? This hurt is so much deeper. She has turned us away, death bed be damned! I had never anticipated our family to splinter to the point to where feuds would sustain through the possibility of death. It's such finality when a person takes a grudge to the grave. If you ever once cared for someone in your life, you should be there for that person if he or she is facing death, and that person should let you. Hadn't Mom taught me that?
I text messaged back and forth with my fiancée, trying to calm down, trying to find level ground with which to settle that boulder of pain on so it wouldn't roll back and crush me, trying to decide what would be the right thing to do. Deep inside, I knew I needed to go to her. Regardless of how things stood between us, regardless of her wish for me not to be there, I needed to be there. I had to to be there, just in case, and I wasn't going to leave Drew behind.
Drew, my three daughters, and I got dressed and gathered things to entertain ourselves with. I cut out one of my recent family photos, the first one to include my fiancee with the girls and I. I had never mentioned him to Mom when we bailed Drew out, but I know the grapevine had told her of my divorce and of my new beau.
After somewhere between an hour and an eternity, we pulled into a hospital parking space. When we got to her room, there was a note on the closed door stating that all visitors must speak with a nurse at the nurse's station. Her room was the only room with this sign.
“Yes, I was needing to speak with a nurse about visiting the patient in room 114.” I said to the first nurse I saw come behind the counter at the station.
“Okay?” She said quizzically.
“There's a sign on the door that says visitors must speak with a nurse before entry.”
“Oh?” She frowned, “let me ask another nurse and see why.”
When she came back, Another Nurse came with her.
“Your name please?”
“Marley Cash.”
“And?” She looked around to Drew and the girls.
“Andrew Cash.” He said.
“And my daughters, Makala, Emalie, and Zoe Benefield.” I added.
She looked at a clipboard, then back up at me.
“She doesn't want you to visit her.”
No Way! She didn't really tell the nurses to disallow our entry into her room, did she? I held my breath.
“Alright.” I sighed, “can you at least tell me if it was actually the patient herself who made this request, or was it a relative, like her son, or maybe her boyfriend?”
“It was the patient herself.” She curtly replied. I know she must have been wondering what I had done so bad to her patient that would warrant her to turn me away.
We left the corridor her room was in and sat in a waiting room in the main entrance of the hospital, allowing me some time to think and decide what I could do to avoid driving back home emotionally empty-handed. I sent Mom's phone a text.
The girls are here. Have the staff let us in.
No one ever responded. The girls were reading magazines, and Drew was on his phone, surfing the internet. I pulled out a notebook. I had hit a brick wall and could not bear the thought of having to return home, leaving the situation like that. More importantly, I was too upset to drive. I sat there quietly and put pen to paper. My thoughts bled through the pages and trickled down my knees, like blood oozing from the gaping wound where the sliver of my heart devoted to Mom used to be.
Decades of heartache and hurt feelings,
piled, one by one.
It may never seem to resolve,
save for when dire times come.
Nothing is more crushing
than all the time lost.
When time's a precious commodity,
priceless is the cost.
How hollow the reality,
being turned away.
If today your last breath you breathe,
how could you have NOTHING to say?
Today, if I leave here,
and to these innocent girls explain
that they too are rejected,
you won't cause them anymore pain.
Our family has never functioned
true to one another.
Up until now, though,
we did, at least, know when to come together.
The last shred in my heart,
of hope that time could change,
has died, slowly, painfully.
We will forever be the family estranged.
Mardy came into the lobby from the front parking lot. I caught his attention.
“The nurses won't let me in to see her.”
“She's having tests done right now. I'll go back there and find her and see what I can do.”
“Thanks.” I nodded, hopeful that we'd get to see her yet.
Thirty minutes later, Mardy exited through another door on the opposite side of the building, hoping to slip past us unnoticed, staring at the ground as he walked, picking up his pace when he saw my head turn towards him in his peripheral vision.
Well, I guess that's that, then.
All these years, Mom has said that I've never cared for her, never wanted anything to do with her. She said it so often, I think it became true. Yet, to this day, fear has gripped me at the thought of having to someday stand over her casket, just as I stood over Dad's when I was a girl. I've always imagined my angst, watching the casket close on issues unsettled, choking down the regret of the years lost, and being called out by others simply for my presence on the day that she is set into the ground. Part of me feels that my actions have alienated my rights to that honor. Maybe as the second party in our failed mother/daughter relationship, my inaction to tend to the void between us negates my right to pay her my respect in the end.
I left the poem and the framed picture with the nurses and returned home, telling my daughters the same sad truth that I had told them before.
“Gee and Mom have a hard time getting along together, babies. We've had a lot of problems over the years. Maybe there is just too much hurt to work past, I don't know, but I do know that the hurt doesn't take the place of the love. The love will always be there. I will always love Gee... sometimes love hurts, though.”
The grapevine told me that the doctors ruled the issue to be stress, sent her home, and made her take a three-day leave from work. It's been four months now and we haven't shared a single word between us. It could be four years more before we do again, or it could be a lifetime. This very well could be our last interaction; only time will tell, but the prognosis seems bleak.
In effect of the flailing love with my own Mom and in the depths of my despair, I curse myself for being dumb enough to bring children into this world. Motherly love comes as naturally to me as standing to pee. Don't get me wrong, I grew up with three brothers, and desperately wanted to be a boy, so I'm not saying I can't do it. It's just a little awkward and can get a little messy. The same is true of me as a mother. Doing what I was not supposed to be able to do was a great source of pride to me as a child. Only later in life have I realized that I never once considered what natural abilities may be lacking in me.
How do you love unconditionally if you harbor love deep in the hull of your being, as something hidden and treasured privately? So easy it is to revert to solitude, shutting out a family around you, denying yourself and each other the joyous purity of love's interactions, and protecting yourself from the pain that habitually walks hand and hand with the hope that love brings.
Navigating the mother/daughter relationship between my girls and me seems to be more of a rocky whitewater trail to me. The rocks jutting about, trying to wreck my passage, are little angry versions of myself. I, too, am the uncomfortable, thrashing water that carries me forward, questioning around which bend the waterfall may be. The chaotic sound of the plummeting waters is drowning to me. The sound is that of my inner most thoughts; the doubts that reside in me.
All too often, I become the wreckage, swept aside by me, the wind. Every element of my demise, every attempt, all is one, akin. For and against myself, daily I discern what it is, this relationship that for forever and always I have yearned. From my perspective as a child, my naivete censored my knowledge of what I lacked. From the view of the adult I've grown to be, my deficit is blatant in respect to my three daughters and I. I see how I am lacking, in the simplest little things, like holding hands and smiling. Why didn't I notice when these things weren't being done to me?
Consciously-forced, loving interactions are trudged through by me, not because I'm indifferent, more because this concept is foreign to me. Hopefully my struggles are not outwardly discernible by my precious little three. Words could not explain to them, nor am I sure appropriate is the nature, the cause of my social ineptitude, the specifics, or what it means for them. Maybe once they are adults, my predicament will be more plain to see. The mission for the meantime, focus here; fix me. I have to work past my hurt, retrain my second nature. If I don't learn to be affectionate, then I might as well call it a family tradition. I am generation number four. I want desperately to save generation number five. I want this pain to stop with me, but it is me who I must right.
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