My mother likes to recount stories of my babyhood, as most
mothers enjoy doing so about their children. Whether they are touching,
dramatic, funny, or just marking a moment in time that has slipped into the
ever-more-distant past matters little; the act of telling the stories is a
gift.
All mothers are familiar with long nights spent trying to
comfort and soothe their infants to sleep. Countless hours are spent holding
and rocking and walking, singing and shushing. My mom tells me that I was a
good baby, not prone to crabbiness nor upset, but that I much preferred being
awake to being asleep. She recounts one night as she held me on her shoulder,
patting my back to burp me after a late feeding. Pat-pat-pat, in triplet-time
she would tap my tiny back, pat-pat-pat, pat-pat-pat. And then…
Pat-pat-pat.
My hand, unsnuggled enough to reach to my mother’s own back,
patted her in return, in triplet-time.
Impossible, she thought, as she stopped burping me. A test:
Pat-pat-pat.
Pat-pat-pat.
Pat-pat-pat.
Pat-pat-pat.
From then on, she says, I would always pat back, and she and
I would smile at each other, our little rhythm set.
********************
A few years later, in my bedroom, I was
often plagued by strange floating visions as I tried to sleep. They were always
the same thing: newsprint and text, chunks of words that swooped like horrible
ghosts wherever I looked, becoming wildly large or minuscule in great swings,
my eyes closed or open. In thinking about it now, I suspect an over-worked,
immature optic system, but then there seemed to be no reason nor answers nor
any way to stop it. In the dark room with just the yellow vertical sliver of
light coming through my slightly-opened door, I would call out for my mother,
distraught. She would come to the end of my bed and sit there, asking me what I
was seeing, how she could help, sad that I was sad. She would sit there, hours
sometime, calming me just by being there, until the ghost print went away and I
could rest.
********************
Any speck of light in my bedroom drives me crazy now,
whether from a tiny gap in the curtains, a blinking red dot on the DVD
player, or the glow from the alarm clock on my nightstand. Light, any light,
wakes me up, irritable for it.
My daughter, now nine years old, sleeps every night with her
lamp on. For as many times as I creep in to silently turn it off, I will find
that she has turned it back on. I don’t fight it now; the glow of her pink
lampshade brings her comfort, brightening the corners, taking away the strange
shadows, as the complete, dense, unseeable blackness of my room comforts me by
illuminating nothing at all.
********************
I see my mother only once a year now. She and I will hug
each other, me now taller than she, her bones felt easily through her sweater.
Pat-pat-pat, I will slowly and deliberately tap on her shoulder. She will smile
broadly, hug me tighter, and pat-pat-pat my own shoulder, curving across her
own, fifty years on.
(Me, 1962, taken by my mom)
© Copyright 2008- Marianne Spellman