Confronting ghosts

She had been a giant.  Cast a huge shadow over every piece of light I tried to filter.  Directed and produced every imagined scenario for years after I last heard her voice.  She had been a battering ram in my glass house.

But not this day.  All that's left now is a shrunken, broken mosaic of anger, sadness and confusion. Still refracting my light while no longer controlling the scene.

That's what I'm left with two weeks after meeting my mother for the first time since she couldn't remember my face.

Before this starts to sound like some sort of tragic Nicholas Sparks novel, let me just say that she did this.  My mother isn't of an advanced age or suffering from some horrible fate of fate's design.  To save time, and a story that I may never be ready to share, let it just be known that her condition is entirely of her own making.  Pity her if you must, but she chose Jack Daniels over her responsibilities.  Worse - she chose numbing the present over knowing the future, and my girls deserved more.  The sole purpose of me walking into the facility where she will live out her days in comfort was to get out the words that might give me a little of my own.  

But first we had to meet.

From the end of the hall and around the corner where the nurse had disappeared, three people slowly came into view - two nurses and a small, round figure in between.  As soon as she saw me, she started yelling that she didn't know me.  

It had been nine years since we'd last spoken.  In that time, she had gone from living in a big house she didn't own and pretending to be the wife of a man who didn't love her - through several sinkholes of her own creation - into a nursing home in a condition I can best describe as what lies at the end of the road you pave with a child you abandon and grandchildren you forgot while you pour yourself another drink of self pity.

And she didn't believe that it was me.  Though, to be fair, if I hadn't been warned about what to expect, I may not have recognized her either.  Smaller than I remember, I suddenly couldn't recall why she scared me anymore.  

Over the next hour, I answered the questions she repeated and waited through her yelling at me for things I wouldn't try to understand.  Sometimes it felt like she was inches away from the woman whose messes my childhood hands had tried to mop, but she always faded back before I got a real look.  Her broken heart, the one I had spent so many years trying to glue together, almost appeared to be back in my grasp moments before she'd wander off again.

Finally, I realized why I was there.  

"They're good girls.

You would've liked them.

Sofia is a nerd and she's beautiful and special and smart.

Eva is an athlete and she's sweet and good and everything I could ask for.

Maya is my queen.  She's daring and freaking funny and three handfuls in one.

They're good girls.

I'm a good mom."

I had spent weeks trying to decide why I was going, trying to figure out if I even had anything to say to her.  Sitting in the well lit dining room of a place where she comfortably forgets our existence, I wanted to tell her that I did fine.  Turns out I didn't need her at all.  

And, though my grandmother in heaven would've never allowed me to say those words to her daughter, I knew she gave me permission to tell her in my own way.

You chose you, mom.  I choose them.

And we are fine for it.

I made it to the car before I cried.  I got my breath back before I made it back to the girls.  It took two weeks, but I finally put words to the healing.

And ten minutes after I left, she wouldn't have remembered my face again.

But I'm ok, mom.  

Paving my own road with real memories and undiluted love.

We're just fine.