Growing

I now sit in a car in Midtown Manhattan. I have pen to paper as a watch tourists mill about the theaters and tourist restaurants. I watch and record people. I watch a little girl proudly holding her father's hand after a night of theater. Red ribbons bounce in her hair as she skips across the busy street, narrowly missing a pedicab. I can see this memory etching in her mind as her father glides her home with her family. Another girl with her family, this one is older. She looks like a high school cheerleader. Her family has the aura associated with the Midwest. She has long blond hair and a pretty face. Her pudgy Midwestern father grabs her hand as they attempt to cross the street and she pulls her arm away from him. She looks around and sees me, her eyes hoping that I didn't see him treat her like a kid.

Adolescence made me a strange creature. For years, I floated. I was a submissive child, able to accept everything told to me. I had an active imagination and I was, looking back at myself, totally innocent and naive. Then the sprout of puberty turned me into a monster. Is monster too harsh a term? Not really. As a teenage girl, I became moody and insolent. I constantly lived in a state of embarrassment, confusion and fear. I felt as if my body was not my own, even my smell changed. I became foreign to myself. "These are the best years of your life" and "Enjoy your youth" were phrases spoken to me frequently. How could I? My life spread out before me even more complicated than the New York City transit system. It was too vast and new and made me afraid of stepping away from my childhood. Still, I bucked and strained against my mother. The most painful thing for her was that I refused to hold her hand in public. I was very young when I resisted her hand to safely guide me through parking lots and crowded streets. I was all ready the same height as her at the age of ten and I felt like I didn't look like we were even related. I thought we looked like lesbians. How much did I know about lesbians at ten years old? Nothing, except that it could cause me some kind of embarrassment.

Mom

We usually don't witness death firsthand. Loved ones get carted away in ambulances and a faceless yet caring nurses takescare of the bedpans and morphine. My mother didn't want to go to a hospital. Mainly because she didn't believe she was dying.

Instead, I watched her struggle with breath while she breathed pure oxygen through a mask. Her cancer was spreading. It had begun in her cervix. Most women catch cervical cancer early, detected in their yearly pap smears. My mother only visited the doctor if she had been in a car accident. It was almost too late by the time she had finally decided to visit a doctor. Her weight loss and unexplained spotting making her realize it may be time to seek out answers. The doctor told her that a hysterectomy would be the only way to stop the disease from continuing. My mother weighed her options. Even though she was fifty and would not be able to have another child, she decided to not have the full surgery. She felt as if she was losing her womanhood and she would not be able to survive without that. It was one of the many bad decisions that the women in my family were famous for making.

She had chemotherapy. Her hair started falling out in big clumps and then she just shaved her head to avoid watching all the hair fall away. I bought her a wig but it made her head itch.