We Weren’t Ready.
We didn’t know what to do and needed help with my mom being sick.
I am on my break and I am starting over. One of the things I know is that I have to trust that everything will be okay. Generationally I should fail. I am a Black girl and we do not fare as well as the boys generationally.
And even if the boy does not fare well, he has those that have done okay enough or exceptionally well to have better odds (than me). You know.
Let me, us, be the pioneers. Be the precedent.
I can’t help but remember the songs we would listen to in Georgia. I have a lot of songs by Bebe and Cece Winans that I remember from childhood and I just found a new one in recent months. It is difficult to carry a singular story. But I can and will.
Starting over.
So back to my mom.
She was in the hosptal sick and we learned that she has what is called amyloidosis. I explained what it was in another post and really the truth is that we believe that an emotional imbalance led to sickness.
For example, my mother didn’t have the best relationship with her siblings, who only came together when she was sick. So that is silly, to suddenly assemble as one once a person is doing badly and on the verge of death, dying. That alone showed some of the emotional baggage via family generational things she carried.
I will say more another day.
At some point she was given six months to live. We didn’t really believe it and we thought we could deal with these numbers. We weren’t met with anything so severe before, not personally at least. Now we know that people overcome diagnoses, but I don’t think we were prepared in any way to try to combat anything, and we didn’t have enough time as things were progressing quickly. And had been missed for so long, the symptoms. It is a rare disease.
But it makes sense that sickness would manifest that all of the bullshit we’d been going through and running from. For example, we never met our Nigerian grandparents. I do not know my girl story on this side. This generational disconnect reminds me of the blank spaces in a number of African American stories as well. So it is no small irony that I am bicultural and deal with missing puzzle pieces galore.
And because my father tends to, even with the help he has given, also tends to harm, I do think he is protected from ever getting sick. Certain types of people are less likely to get sick I always feel. He shuts off the part of his brain where emotions are processed negatively I wonder sometimes.
I only stayed in Los Angeles where my mom was in the hospital for two days, the weekend. And would come back in November when I wouldn’t take time to go to a dance class. It is annoying because all of my life I felt so angry at my mom for not sharing herself with me. I remember when I would be on MARTA with her, and I asked to lay my head on her shoulder from stop to stop, waiting for our stop to come up, and she pushed me off, not in a rude way, but in a way that she didn’t really want to be touched.
I remember this one time this happened when I was six.
Like give her her space.
It was decided that she would stay with my uncle who could convert a room for her in his condo in Northern California. And my younger siblings would take care of her because they had the ability to. I hope I can repay them somehow because I should have been in the position to since I’m older you know.
This uncle was helpful, extremely helpful during this process. He is a doctor as one might expect a Nigerian who immigrated to the United States to be, especially a boy you know. As I said in the boys of my mom’s family are doing well, he is a liver transplant surgeon, more than a doctor. That takes more work.
My mom never reached her potential. There are a lot of reasons but as a girl, a Nigerian girl immigrating in the 1970s, she had more strikes against her than her brothers.
So we’ll get to this part next.
Things devolved into tribalism eventually. I have to talk about how he helped. Two of my siblings didn’t acknowledge his contribution, but I am acknowledging all that everyone did. It was a group effort. And me, I just tell the story.
It is my turn now I think. I didn’t do much, as much as others. I think now is my turn to take the torch now. I hope I can.
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