My mother says her four-day mental pilgrimage to the land of the insane was an ode to her love for me. On day one, she fainted. On day two, she was bedridden. On days three and four, I would enter her room to find her on the floor crying, an activity she would proceed to do for three hours that day, slapping her own face in between episodes of delirium, and wailing to the Gods to please let this nightmare end. “What are you talking about?” I plead in my own set of tears. “Please, Mama, why are you doing this?”
“Because I love you,” she’d say. “I’m doing this because I love you.”
Earlier in the month, my mother had had a dream. “You were running from something, naked.” My clothes were torn; my most intimate, personal parts of me flesh shown to the people. “There was an ugly, big, black snake wrapped around your body, but he had a human face.” My mother says the snake’s head was one she recognised. It was of an evil man. “He will hurt you,” she confided in me. “He will do unspeakable things to you, and he will ruin your life. If it hasn’t happened yet, it will eventually. My dreams always come true.” As if it were contagion, I also start to lose touch with reality. “Oh, my love, I’m so worried about you.”
Dreamland starts lending its persona to my reality. For a few weeks, her fabricated universe and my real life start melding into one; where one begins and the other ends, I’m not sure. “My mother loves me,” an angel character from this dream world persuades me to think. “She’s this worried about me because she loves me.” I do not know the man from my mother’s dream, but what I do know is that if love manifests itself as this much hurt, then it only means that it’s complex enough to have transcended into planes my puny reality is unable to reach. It is so grand, so perplexing, so above me, that only a mother is able to engulf it. It starts to make sense to me.
“I swear, Mama, I’m safe and I’m right here in front of you. I’m fully dressed. This man has never touched me.” I am holding a holy book, lest my claim isn’t believable enough otherwise.
In the justifications needed to mellow her emotional state of mind, now an hourly frequence, my thoughts become prudent. Can the snake find me if I am walking the streets alone? What if he calls me on the phone and I pick up unknowingly? Does he even know my number? My mom prophesied he will hurt me. She loves me and I love her, so I have to make sure I go nowhere near him. If this episode is a mere knee jerk reflex to a thought, who knows what will happen when it reenacts right in front of us. I am scared of the evil snake.
The snake is an unwanted visitor in our house. Why has my mother’s love invited him in? “There is nothing in this life I care about enough to bring me down like this. Only my love for you is strong enough to have this effect on me.” If I want to exorcise the snake, will that compromise on my mother’s love for me? “I’m just a mother who loves her daughter. These are normal feelings and this is a normal reaction.” The snake is now a member of our household.
My sanity is mesh. Obviously, there are no decisions when it comes to love, only really strong retorts. My efforts to decide whether it’s best to join my mom on her plane or to bring her down to mine is an illusion. One of them helps translates my mother’s love, apparently complicated to me, so I can actually feel it — god forbid I don’t. The latter, though no snakes around, is a cul-de-sac, like slamming the door in the face of that love. There is no choosing, anyway. If there were a choice, my mother would have picked better. So, I take the ladder that fades into the clouds.
Up here, it feels cozy and familiar. It smells like the perfume my mother wore when I was a child. Up here, my mother loves me, and, though there are snakes, she will protect me from them via foresight of dreams. Up here, there is a transcript of love written in a language I can finally begin to understand — at least once I’ve started to live some more on this sphere. Oh, to understand a mother’s love. Up here, I am rid of all and any earthly desires to receive a love written in a language known to me because up here, I understand her language. I have given up my own. I am, after all, my mother’s daughter, and my mother is insane.