Adding Up the Moments
During the 1972/1973 school year, my family lived in Scotland. Two-thirds of the way into the year, my mom had a big surgery. She stayed in the hospital for two weeks before coming home. During those two weeks, I visited her once. I was eleven years old, she was thirty-four.
My dad asked me several times if I wanted to go see her, and after the one time, I declined. Hospitals frightened me. More than that, I found the sight of my mom in a hospital bed deeply troubling. Only moments before she’d been the vibrant center of our family’s life that she usually was, teaching dance classes to Scottish women and children, and cycling into the Scottish countryside with my dad or the whole family. Now she lay in a bed that seemed designed to make her look small and vulnerable. I couldn’t bear to see her that way.
Years later, I learned she’d been confused by my behavior, and a bit hurt. She wanted to see me while she was recovering in the hospital. Of course she did.
I couldn’t go back and make my eleven-year-old self stretch herself a little more, but I could try and learn from the experience.
Fifty years later, a friend, who has not felt herself for several months, finally has a diagnosis. Today, I’ll go see her in the hospital. I still don’t like being in hospitals. They are places where our vulnerability and mortality are laid bare. It’s unsettling to come face-to-face with how much things can and do change.
This morning, I had an imaginary conversation with my mom. In it, I said to her, “I hope you feel I’ve made up for my lapse in Scotland.” The idea of this exchange made me laugh. Because of course I have. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had decades of life to make sure she and I wouldn’t be forever fixed at that moment, when my fear overwhelmed my empathy and I didn’t extend comfort to someone I love.
We’re all of us made up of many moments. We wish we could do some of those moments over again; in others, we do show up the way we intend to. A good enough life is one where those latter moments outweigh the former, and we can forgive ourselves.
...Like the Hurricane 
I’m going to use this as a reflection at one of our meetings at the hospital, with your permission. It’s such a vivid and gentle reminder of how hard it can be for loved ones to show up, and what it means when they do.
Katrina, for me, this was a touching piece. It captured moments of childhood anxiety about events not understood, but felt as “world-shaking”. I had some of these especially via my parents separation, and remember especially anxiety in filling out the standard little attendance cards about family contcts, etc.
thks as always for these — hope all is well in your world!
love, tm
Katrina, I am just catching up with your posts. Ah children! Even in loving food-secure homes, life takes us to moments we’ve no idea how to navigate. My face just now is twisted up sad that you and again most all of us have had moments that could have used “more”~guidance and empathy~and the impact of that goes on and on and on. Bless your little 10 (?) year old heart still beating with all the others. Love!