The Heart of a Mother
Thomas Wolfe famously wrote, “You can’t go home again.”
We learn from the time we’re young that home is where the heart is. The word “Home” adorns throw pillows and needlepoint wall hangings, and is lauded in song. Home is not is not about location, but about environment. Home is where you feel loved. Home is where you feel accepted. Home is where you feel safe. Home is where you fit, not just for now, but where you’ll fit for life.
Growing up, my world was a quiet house on a quiet street in a quiet suburb in New York. We did not lock the door to our house at night, and did not have to look both ways before crossing the street.
The biggest danger plaguing my young world was the towering spruce tree in the corner of my parents’ front yard. Standing over 18 feet tall, it dwarfed everything: our house, the electric wires, and me, and it was just begging to be climbed, especially when the girl across the street, Jennifer, dared me to climb it. Jennifer was everything I was not: tall, athletic, daring, vivacious, pretty! When she said “climb!”, I asked, “how high?” I climbed as high as I could, moving from the thick, sturdy limbs at the tree’s base, to the sparser, thinner ones higher up. I wanted to be King of the Mountain! But Newton had other ideas (what comes up must come down), and I, as my mother later put it, “fell and went boom!” This would not be the last time I went out on a limb to impress a girl, and it would not be the last time I fell far and hard as a result.
Luckily I was only banged up. My mother put a Band-Aid on each cut, said “Kiss and make better!,” and it magically did feel better. It seemed there was no hurt that a Band-Aid and those magic words could not heal.
Of course, we learn too soon, parent and child alike, that there are some wounds that words and Band-Aids cannot heal.
By the time I was three years old, I’d had been hospitalized numerous times, for everything from multiple eye surgeries and a near-fatal allergy to anesthesia, to Reye’s Syndrome. By the time I was five, I was convinced that I was broken; defective; congenitally flawed. It cost my mother untold hours, weeks and years of worry, and ultimately cost her job. She had worked at a large record company as Head of Copyright, the youngest in the company’s history, before my illnesses forced her to resign. There was no family leave law then, only “come in to work, or stay with the sick kid, your choice”. I tried to make up for it by being good. Mom tried to make up for it by trying to save me from the world.
So, by the time kindergarten rolled around, my mother was not about to let me go in alone. To ensure I would not enter the Brave New World unprotected, my mother planned ahead: she’d come to school and sing for us. She marched me into class that first day, and, rather than seeing me off with a kiss goodbye, walked in, her 12-string Martin guitar in hand, and announced to the class that she would lead us in sing-alongs. She sang the classics — The Wheels on the Bus; John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt; Frere Jacques, and she added my personal favorite, Shell Silverstein’s “I’m Being Eaten by a Boa Constrictor.”: I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor, a boa constrictor, a boa constrictor, I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor, And I don’t like it one little bit.
The class giggled and clapped, and I felt proud and safe. Mom kept the good streak at school going by coming in monthly, and often brought homemade chocolates or cookies. “One for each hand!” she’d exclaim as she passed out two cookies to each child, as she always did for me at home.
I did not realize then how much my mother was sacrificing, just as she had her career years earlier.
My mother, like any parent, was someone’s child herself, someone in need of a parent’s nurturing, guidance, and care. But her mother, my grandmother, who had successfully battled a brain tumor when my mother was in her late teens, was now battling multiple myeloma. My mother’s days were spent running to and from Long Island Jewish Hospital. Looking back, I rarely saw Mom eat, and she was so thin and tired, so sick herself, that her doctor gave her a portable heart monitor. It was a black rectangle, no bigger than a Walkman, with a metal node on the back she’d hold up to her chest, and it would record her heart rhythm. She had to call a phone number at the end of the day, and hold the monitor up the phone. It would emit a long, shrill beep, laying out the beats and inner workings of her heart to a computer listening on the other end of the line.
I recalled that each time I was sick, or the times, later, when I was bullied at school, it would break that heart. I decided fairly early that the best protection I could give my mother’s heart was to shield her from injury to mine. So, I decided not tell my parents when things were rough. I’d not tell them if I’d been bullied, I’d not tell them of my first broken heart (though mothers always know) or any of the broken hearts that would follow.
I knew what the doctors did not. I knew what was wrong with my mother’s heart — an excess of empathy. I know, because I have the same gift/curse. If someone I care for is upset, I feel it viscerally, a physical sensation that something is off. How much pain can you watch your child go through before your heart breaks? What can a parent do, what is a parent, when a kiss can’t make it better?
Home is what you’d run into a fire to protect. It’s who you’d run into a fire to protect.
Thomas Wolfe was wrong. We grow up and leave our childhood houses, but we often never leave home, not in the sense that matters. Whether we move minutes, or miles or even oceans away, those connections, those things that make the heart swell or ache, remain. Even when we grow apart, they are always our parents, and we, always their children. As long as we draw breath, they remain home, regardless of where we live.
