The Choice to Love
Three days ago, I got a pulse oximeter in the mail. It’s a little device that checks your pulse and blood oxygen level, and it’s helpful in a pandemic like this. I hadn’t ordered it, but the second I opened the package, I knew who had.
When I was a kid, I never really understood my mother. My father was the one that gave us hugs and came to all my soccer games. My mother was the one that did the finances and stayed off to the side while my dad and my brother played music together. She never sang when we went to Christmas parties with our friends. My dad played music with his friend, and both his friend’s daughters sang. Even their mother tried to sing every once in a while, even though we all knew she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.
But my mom never sang, and I didn’t understand why.
In fact, my mother features in very few of my memories from my childhood. As doctors, my parents worked a lot, but they always made sure one of them was home with us on the weekends. Even so, almost all of my memories of my mother before age eighteen are of her in the kitchen. Not because that was where she belonged as the woman of the house, but because that was where she thrived. The kitchen was her domain. My father was allowed to make exactly four things: garlic bread, waffles, toast, and his signature guacamole. My mother made everything else. And so that is where all my vague memories of her reside; her cooking while I did my homework at the kitchen counter.
That lasted right up until the summer before college, when she told me, in public, and in the most uncomfortable way possible, that she was worried about me being promiscuous in college.
It took me years to understand why she would say something like that to me. I was eighteen, had never been in a serious relationship, and had never even considered having sex with someone at that point in my life. So for my mother — the woman who raised me — to say something like that, it felt like she never knew me at all. I managed to drive five miles away from that coffee shop before I pulled over to call a friend and cry. How could my mother not know me?
It was years before I realized that this was just like the pulse oximeter I got three days ago. This was my mother trying to show me that she cared in the only way she knew how. By offering me what little of herself she felt safe offering.
My grandparents were very traditional. They thought a woman’s job was to be a wife, to stay at home with the kids. When my mother told them she was going to be a doctor, she was all but disowned. That wasn’t the place for a woman. That wasn’t her job. She didn’t listen. Now she’s the Chief of Infectious Disease at the hospital she’s spent her career working at, and has done more to save lives during this pandemic than I can even comprehend. Any parent would be proud of her. But not hers.
When I was born, my mother had to make a choice between her career and staying at home with me. She was fresh out of med school and had to decide which path her life was going to take. My dad would have supported her no matter what she chose, and she knew that. She chose to continue to work, though with reduced hours. I know she regrets that choice sometimes. She wishes she’d spent those years with me. But I could never begrudge her that, what with the full life she’s lived and the change she’s been able to affect from her position. She has changed the lives of so many people, and I count myself among those.
It would have been easy after that disastrous conversation at the coffee shop to write off my relationship with my mom. To walk away and hold it against her. But when the rest of the world failed me, she kept showing up. Awkwardly, uncomfortably, and with none of the social grace that I sometimes wish she had, but she showed up. Again and again until the only thing I could really do was accept that she was here for me in a way that so few others were. I could have walked out on my mother the way her parents did. I might even have been justified, with all the things she has said to me over the years, both then and after.
But I didn’t.
So many of us love our parents by default, or reject them because of the things they have done to us or around us, and all of these choices are valid. But I count myself among the fortunate few that get to choose to love their families. I choose to love my mother. She isn’t perfect — not by a long shot — but she chooses to show up for me every day. When I came out to her as bisexual, she stood and listened while my dad asked all the questions he could think of. She showed up, despite her discomfort. When I was hospitalized for being a danger to myself, she flew out to help me get everything in order when I was discharged. She showed up for me so that I didn’t have to do that alone. And with the pandemic raging, she sent me a pulse oximeter in the hope that I “wouldn’t have to use it.” She showed up for me, reminding me that I am loved and that there are people that would do anything to keep me safe. I choose to love my mother because she keeps showing up for me, day after day.
And after all, isn’t that what family is?
