Hot Pad
After rotating for two and a half minutes in the microwave, the hot pad perfumes our kitchen and living room. I scrunch up my nose at the smell: like a sweaty tree. It reminds my mom more of horse feed, maybe, or wet soil. We suspect that it’s filled with beads of rye, but whatever its composition, the hot pad’s unmistakable umami has become as close to a panacea as I know. One whiff and my shoulder blades loosen and descend in anticipation. I begin to breathe from my belly. I soak it up.
When the microwave beeps, we take out the yellow rectangle, about the size of a child’s pillow, and hear quiet maracas in our hands. The quarter-inch kernels jostle together and apart, following gravity between our fingers. The hot pad is too hot to hold for long, so we wrap it inside a towel and carry it to the couch. I lie on my back and my mom rests it over my chest.
I have bronchitis. In this memory and all others like it, I am cared for. In between coughs, as the heat drains my lungs and the towel slips to uncover a corner of the pad, I appreciate the fabric’s diagonal grid of abstract icons, which to my sick eyes look like little hearts surrounded by corn husks. She asks if it’s heating what needs it, and I nod. Only after twenty minutes of stillness have passed and I lift up the pad do I notice an oblong sweat stain mapped below my collarbone. I am still coughing, but I take this dampness as proof that I am healing.
My mom taught me to make my pain known. In our home, cheeks soaked in tears are proof of a cure-in-progress: we never bottle, we always share. During the year before I left for college, not a week would pass without one of us sniffling at the dinner table, then the other muffling sobs with a paper napkin. When I go home for the holidays, rarely do 48 hours pass before we’re crying together. The causes — a bad grade, something hidden, a fight — are relevant until they aren’t. What matters is the reciprocal sharing of vulnerability, the ritual of it, reiterating this special form of intimacy. I’m here with you. Crying means there is something worth crying about, some part of the other worth understanding. I’m hearing you.
At college, I do almost all of my crying alone. Which sounds pathetic — but I like to think of my weekly bawl-fests as useful, reverse-engineered introspection. If something is bothering me but I can’t figure out what it is, I ignore its cause and coax out its effect with YouTube videos of wedding vows. It’s almost an art, divining the perfect series of stimulating media to arrive at the type of tears that feel right in the moment. This act of crying is just that — an act, a performance — but, in this case, content follows form. I come to realize, eventually, from where my initial sadness sprung, the waterworks carrying me into otherwise inaccessible canyons of the mind. I share these with my mom later, and as her voice cracks alongside mine, I am struck by the ways in which her sensitivity has become my own.
*
When I was four and we lived in Berlin, my mom took a train by herself to the Johannesbad Fachklinik, a health center near the German border. She had never spent this much time apart from her only child, so before she left, she wrote me 21 postcards, one for every day of her absence. She conscripted my dad to hide one in his chest pocket every chilly morning, walk to our mailbox, and pretend to discover it inside, newly delivered. I don’t remember any particular card, but I know that together, they would teach me one new word and one new feeling: fibromyalgia, and her vindication.
She returned, and I learned how to pronounce the five syllables of her diagnosis — emphasis on “my-ALL,” as in all of her. As in the aching muscles, the upset stomachs, and the tides of pain that had made her body an inhospitable island for 25 years. She had not expected a label this encompassing, one that spoke to so many of her discomforts. She also had not expected one this empty. Doctors don’t know what causes fibro nor how to cure it, as true now as when she was diagnosed. Soon after, she bought two hand-sewn hot pads from a craftswoman at a Weihnachtsmarkt, an open-air Christmas market. Those pads have shared our bodies ever since.
*
She winces and leans forward.
“Ah, not right now,” she says, nudging my arm off of her right shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I say, drawing it away and into my lap.
I often move to hug my mom this way: right elbow around neck, bicep against back, coaxing us together on the couch. It never works. There are too many pressure points, and I always forget to give enough warning. I know her fibromyalgia is chronic and incurable, but I stretch out my arm again and again, wondering if, this time, something will have changed.
My mom tries to describe what it’s like to feel what she feels. “It’s like a shell of armor — the pain is this encasement around me,” she says. She feels wounded all over. The wounds feel like a defense, a self-defense in which she has no say. They are sore to the touch, and so is she.
The hot pad — heavier, not so bony — is my proxy. It embraces her neck when I can’t. But it can only soothe for so long. After its heat is lost in her, I am again reminded that I will never know what it means to be of her body.
*
Facing the unbridgeable gap between her hurt and my health, I have adopted an embarrassing habit. I want to smell and feel our hot pads even when I’m not sick. I’ll check my body for heat discrepancies: my hands are cold, my ears are burning. I’ve exaggerated barely stuffy noses into influenza and turned lymph nodes into tumors.
I can’t be sure where this mild hypochondria came from, but it’s no accident. I have been sensitized by a woman who is never all-the-way well, who deserves to be as sensitive as she is. I am well, but sometimes I wish I were not. I pity myself. I melodramatize. I reflect her like the water’s surface, an unsteady mirror. How much of my empathy is made up of myself?
I gave her a present, a book by Elaine Scarry called The Body in Pain, which says that “to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” That second phrase scares me because I know how much it has hurt her to have doctors, therapists, and an ex-husband play the role of non-believer. But I’ve played it too. Instead of being her closest confidant, I’ve become, at times, my mom’s biggest skeptic. On one level, I know she is hurting, but thoughts wallow in my mind: Could she be faking it? Has the shell of armor trapped her or protected her, an excuse for not doing as much as she and others want her to do? How heavy is her pain, really? Prove yourself, Mom, I want to say. Let me feel it.
*
I wish all bodies were hollow. No organs to fail, no nerves to pinch. Human processes performed by skin surrounding inflated air.
I tell this to my mom and she laughs. “You’re being silly,” she says, bending down. “Help me load the dishwasher.”
I am quick to define her by her pain, but she is not. She believes in her limbs, and she’s fought to find professionals who believe in her. Her new physical therapist has almost unkinked her scoliosis; not genetic, as she had always been told, but caused by years of asymmetric muscle firing. She attends an aerobic water yoga class three times a week to stave off malaise. And last summer, we hiked a steep six miles up the Garden-to-Sky trail to a peak on Catalina Island. When she started to slow, she asked me to take her pack, and I did. When she said she wanted to turn back, I dashed around the next bend, saw the summit, and asked her if she had anything left in her. She did. The coasts on both sides of the island gleamed. At home, hot pad resting over thighs, she told me how strong she felt.
I can’t feel my mom’s twinges, emotional or physical. Nor can she fully communicate them to me, nor I to you. But I can trust her when she tells me that bodies are what we make of them and, when I fly home for Christmas, tend to her armor when she asks me.
The hot pad is itself two oceans — a hidden stitch divides it into dual pouches. That way, its little grains don’t all shift to one side. That way, when it has done what it needs, we can fold it and neatly store it in the cupboard, by the tea, for when we need it next.
