Mom, Not Mom

MOM, NOT MOM

I came home on a Tuesday, three months after the accident. The house looked exactly like it had the day I left it. My school bag was still by the door, the Diet Coke can with the straw still poking out still on the sink, the clothes I’d tossed down the stairs in a rush still hanging over the stair rail. Everything was the same as it was when I left it. Everything except me. Tim wheeled me into my mom’s bedroom, I couldn’t get up the stairs to mine, and turned on the TV like that would help. “There ya go!” he said and went straight to the lawnmower outside. I lay there, nine months pregnant, face mangled, neck in a brace, spine stitched back together, watching reruns of a life I didn’t feel part of anymore.

The next five days were a blur of visitors, friends with pizza and stories, flowers and voices too loud for a house that still smelled like bleach and grief. Everyone wanted to talk about the wreck. About how I ALMOST died. About how lucky I was. They said things like “You’re a miracle” and “We thought were going to lose you” and “The whole church was praying.” I smiled when I could, and when I couldn’t, I let them fill the room with noise. It was better than the silence. One night I pretended to sleep just so I didn’t have to explain why I didn’t feel like a miracle. My mom sat beside the bed and brushed my hair. I remember her saying, “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to walk. So don’t worry,” like she could will it into being.

Morgan came too soon. It was 9:00 Saturday morning, and I barely had time to finish the enchiladas from the night before. I was still in a neck brace, still scared to ride in a car, still learning how to stand up without blacking out, and yet, there she was, screaming her way into a world I hadn’t yet returned to. They wheeled me into a fluorescent room, said “Push,” and at 11:16 AM, Morgan was born.

I didn’t hold her. Not right away. She was taken to the intensive care nursery, and I was wheeled to recovery, where everything smelled like soap and metal. I could hear strangers talking about her from somewhere down the hall, but I couldn’t move. I stared at the ceiling and waited for someone to tell me what to feel. Nobody did.

She didn’t look like me. That’s the first thing I noticed. Six pounds of someone else’s eyes and a mouth so big it took up most of her face. My dad said she looked like Tim. My mom said she looked like herself. My Grandmother said she was the most beautiful baby she'd ever seen. I wasn’t sure what I thought, only that she felt more like a stranger than a daughter. A stranger I was now responsible for.

So I went home again. This time with someone smaller, louder, and just as helpless as me. We both had to learn how to live, how to eat, how to sit up, how to walk. And my mom, God help her, did it all for both of us, and Ginger too. Every diaper, every bottle, every bath, every stretch of my dishrag legs and frozen arm. She worked nights and came home to care for babies, one twenty-one year old, one twenty year old, and one twenty days. I tried to help. I tried to be Morgan’s mom. But most days, I just watched from the bed while mine did it all.

One evening, my mom came home from a twelve hour shift, and she was so tired, she could barely keep her eyes open as she sat on the edge of the bed with a diaper in her hand. I couldn’t stand the thought of her doing one more thing, so I took the wipes out of her hands and tried to change Morgan’s diaper by myself. I got the wipes and with my one good arm, tried to lift Morgan out of her crib. Morgan came up, I went down, and my mom did a nose dive across the room and caught Morgan in one hand and my pajama pants in the other. “You’re not ready yet,” she said with a yawn. I hated how true that was.

And no one ever thanked her.

Not once.

It happened in the fall, before I’d gone back to school or anywhere by myself. The world outside looked like stained glass, amber and garnet and gold, and I wanted to take Morgan out into it. Just to sit on the grass. Just to feel something new. Something not tied to IV bags or diapers or blood. Our house smelled like cinnamon and laundry detergent, and for a moment, I thought maybe everything would be okay.

I was halfway across the living room, walking carefully, still stiff, still afraid of falling, when a mouse darted across the floor.

I screamed. Loud.

“Mom!!”

She came running from the other side of the house with Morgan in her arms. “Stop that!” she scolded. “You’re scaring her!”

Then the mouse ran again, and she screamed. I screamed again. Morgan screamed just because we were screaming.

Mom shoved her into the playpen, away from the mouse, and then jumped up on the coffee table like she weighed nothing. I hauled myself onto the couch and tucked my feet under me, still shouting and bouncing.

We must’ve looked ridiculous. A grown woman in a neck brace. A nurse in scrubs on a table. A baby clapping her hands like she was at a concert.

But then I heard it.

“Mom!” Morgan was reaching out, crying, flapping her hands at my mother.

Mom?

I went quiet. I looked at my mom. She looked at Morgan. Morgan kept flapping.

And then she said it like it was the most natural thing in the world, “Mom will get you.”

I don’t know what part of me snapped first, the scarred one, the sleep-deprived one, the one who’d handed her body over for this child to be born.

But I said as sharply as a twenty year old with the voice of a twelve year old could say, “No, Morgan. She is NOT your mom. I am your mom. You DO NOT CALL HER THAT.”

Mom turned to me like I was being unreasonable. “Christie… she doesn’t know. She hears you and Ginger call me Mom. She hears us call you Christie. She’s just a baby. She doesn’t know any better.”

But that was the point, wasn’t it?

She didn’t know any better.

And no one had taught her.

Later that night, when the house was still, I stood by the crib. Morgan was half asleep, one tiny hand clutching the rail, her mouth working around the word like it had meaning.

“Mom,” she mumbled.

I didn’t answer. I just stood there.

She would be back, to that voice, that scent, that comfort. Back to the woman who had saved us both. The one who fed her, bathed her, held her. The one who never asked to be called “Mom,” but never gave her another name.

When she looked at my mom, she saw safety, softness, arms that always opened. When she looked at me, I think she saw someone broken. Someone healing. Someone unfamiliar.

And maybe one day she’d see me, really see me. But for now, I just stood in the doorway. Trying not to disappear.