When I bake, I bake on the floor.

I like it down here, it feels safe and grounded. It feels like it’s finally okay to straight-up relax and be myself.

Today is the first day in two weeks where I’ve felt like myself—just plain ol’ little me, being exactly who I am, without the thoughts of maybe I shouldn’t be this way, or, I should definitely be doing something different.

And so today, I will bake on the floor.

I will light all the candles, dim the lights and put music on low enough to still hear the sugar granules rub against each other as they pour from bowl to bowl.

While definitely not the most pleasant two weeks of my life, the last two weeks have certainly been important. They’ve certainly kicked me down from my spiritual high-horse and walked all over me. They’ve even threatened to take my horse to the market and sell it to the market basket-maker, just to spite me—just so I know that, silly, Brentan, you’re not cut out for this spiritual horse-back ride, save that stuff for the basket-makers.

I melted the butter on the stove, and then added frozen bananas right to the bowl. Now the butter has re-solidified against the sides—this is also how the last two weeks have stuck to me.

We’ve been fairly regular hospital patients since 1996, and we’ve been fairly regular cardiac patients since 2005. You would think that with all this time we’ve had to go through all of this together, we would have it down.

I would have down my end of the phone-call where she says, “Come home now, please;” I would have down the brief conversation of introduction during shift change with the nursing staff; I would have down the soothing conversational remedies of everything’s going to be okay and I’m right here, don’t worry.

But I don’t have any of this down.

I also clearly don’t have these baking skills down. I wonder if this now chunky butter is going to mess up this bread.

We only get one mother on this planet, and you would think, come hell or high water, we would know how to rock that relationship at a certain point.

I used to think of illness as a curse, but perhaps maybe it’s a gift. For as long as I can remember, it hasn’t been just me and my mom—it’s been me, my mom and her illness. And the dance the three of us fumble through is not generally a pretty dance—there’s a lot of toe-stepping and mis-direction, and sometimes one of us will just straight up ignore the other two and leave them out to hang on the dance-floor.

Even though I am her child, it is now dawning on me that it is perhaps my choice whether illness will tire us or energize us—will we sit or will we dance?

This seems like a daunting task. This seems like a daunting task because I have a catalogue of 25 years of memories and interactions and behavioral patterns, and I don’t think I need to dig all this up (because I’ve done this before and I’m not sure how helpful it was), rather, I need to decide—and I mean really decide with everything I’ve got inside of me—that absolutely none of that matters.

Throw the catalogue out.

It was easy for me to decide with everything I have inside of me that it doesn’t matter that I’ve botched nearly two-thirds of every banana-bread experiment I’ve ever done. I’m still going to bake on the floor today.

Decisions are easy. Sometimes I just have the thought that they aren’t.

It wasn’t just the inter-personal dynamic between my mother and I that threw me off my horse these past two weeks.

It was her unrelated chest pain, the addition of her third heart attack to her resume, test results saying troponin levels were high, the angiogram that pointed out occlusion in three arteries that had already been worked on twice in the past, the two-day conversation between three surgeons discussing the logistics and safety of triple-bypass, and the over-riding question of the week: is this it?

Is this the day I’ve been thinking about for 17 years? Will it all come down to now, when I’ve imagined it in thousands of different ways? I’ve imagined it in hospital scenarios quite like this one, but I’ve also imagined a car crash, an over-dose, an unfortunate fall down the stairs, a mystery and a suicide note. I’ve imagined it being quick and I’ve imagined it being drawn-out–perhaps I make several trips over several weeks and stay five days at a time until I’ve emotionally maxed-out and need a break, and when I come back, her lips are different, her eyes, her hair, until…nothing.

I’ve imagined being at her side for it, I’ve imagined being away for it and just getting the call—the call! And who would be on the other end of that? The police? Her neighbors? My aunts? My sister? Would this be the event that brings this family together or would this be the event to drive us even farther apart?

But could this really be…now? Could all of this talk about a heart that just would rather stop working give her the way out?

These past two weeks have changed how I experience my own heart.

It was when her surgeon—the one who watched me be eight, and then watched me be 12, and then watched me be 19—and I’m sure she’s heard all sorts of things about my life that she would never tell me—told her the troponin levels were high.

And my mother could not remember that word for the life of her—calling the proteins that measure heart injury tralalas instead (which always made me smile and fill with love for her, even though I never said anything).

It was when we found out the tralalas were high that my heart started feeling differently. Like it was being squeezed. And I was no longer just peripherally aware of my heart—my entire life was in my heart. I could feel my heart from the inside of it—I could feel the mechanism inside of it that chose the next beat and hummed real quietly at first, and let vibration raise until the pump squeezed into bursting.

I was suddenly overwhelmed by the workload of it all, and the rhythm of the BIG pump, small pump, small pump, small pump, BIG pump, small pump, small pump, small pump, BIG pump, and so on.

But I think the thing that made my heart the heaviest was that during all of this time, we talked about this being the end for her, we talked about what idiots the day nurses were and we talked about options for bypass versus doing another angiogram to put in stints, but what we weren’t talking about was love.

We weren’t talking about how much I frigging love her. I wasn’t talking about how grateful I am that I just get to be me, and if there is any person in the world responsible for any of that or all of that—it’s my mother.

I wasn’t talking about that time in Seattle 20 years ago when we repaved the backyard and took our favorite cookie cutters out to the wet cement and she let us press them into the wet ground to create whatever scenery we wanted so that next week we could color it in with chalk and hose it off and do it again and hose it off and do it again and hose it off.

I wasn’t talking about that one time when I was five—I split a worm in half and started crying, inconsolable, because of the owie, and ran upstairs. I still remember the look on her face when she saw how upset I was—like she was prepared to run through the night like a banshee for me, and when she saw the worm and heard me ask for a bandaid, the look of concern almost instantaneously transformed to pure adoration, and so she helped me pick out the best Minnie Mouse one and tape the worm back together and take him outside.

And I still remember how fucking beautiful she was that day.

And it took us five days in the hospital, and the night before I left to come back to the city I live in now—comfortably saddled 2,000 miles away, where I can pretend like nothing is happening on the coastline of the pacific if I want to—to have the conversation we should have been having this entire time. Not just the entire time of my visit, but the entire time of our lives—the conversation that anything besides love is just stupid.

The conversation where it is not two people pitted against each other, but two people pitted against the confusion they find in each other’s company.

Like it usually does, it took me five days of being back before the squeeze of the heart started to lighten. It took me five days of being back to really forgive myself for not doing certain things or doing other things and not having things figured out and straightened away and tied up nicely like they’re supposed to. It took me five days to let go of the conflict I have inside of me that says, Hey, girl, shape up, you don’t want to be fighting with her when it’s her time to go. 

It isn’t her time to go.

It’s simply our time to reconfigure. It’s simply our time to simplify everything down to just one thing: love.

And that is why, today, it is time for me to simplify too. It is time to take things down from the countertop—so high away from everything—and put it all down on the floor, and take my sitting bones down and my legs down and my feet down. It’s time to put this bowl in-between my legs and spin it around as I mix and stir and lightly sing some Aimee Mann and Barenaked Ladies.

It is the day where I take eight ingredients from eight different bags and boxes and mix them to homogeny, and when I put it in the oven and let the smell be my timer, I will just lie here, on this sacred ground, and feel my heart—my little heart—that was only made for loving, even when I sometimes think it was made for other things.

Heart to floor, floor to earth, earth to universe.

Connected and loved.

 

Want 15 free additional reads weekly, just our best?

Get our weekly newsletter.

 

Ed: Bryonie Wise

Photo: Kristina Nichols