Looking out for Mom

One Saturday morning, when I was almost exactly the age my own daughter is now, I spent what seemed like hours peeking from behind a corner of my window shade as uniformed men and women, some purposeful, some not, walked in and out of our front door. Listening to the crackle of their radios, I strained for a hint of what was happening as I counted the fire trucks and police cars that lined our dead-end street. More than one person had called in our medical emergency, and it appeared that the entire county had responded, if only for the lack of anything better to do. If I had been looking, I'm sure I would have seen our neighbors pushing back their curtains or boldly staring from their yards, but I wasn't looking. I was waiting. My younger brother was out there, in the middle of it all, but, scared of what I might find, or hear, or see, I didn't want to get too close. Later, when they wheeled my mother out to the ambulance, I, still at my surveillance post, was reassured to notice that she had insisted the paramedics allow her to get dressed. She's not a vain woman, and I knew refusing to go to the hospital in a faded gown and housecoat was as good of a sign as any stable vitals they may have recorded. Nobody reads a mother better than her child, even from the other side of the window.

I don't remember if my mother was checked directly in to the hospital that day, or how long she was gone once she was admitted, but other memories of that time are as vivid as the paramedics' visit. The days my father's mother and sister used my mother's absence to swoop in and rearrange all our furniture and toss out anything they didn't personally see a use for are forever in my memory, filed under Tragedies I Failed to Prevent. My brother and I may have been young, but we recognized a crime when we saw one. All we could think to do, once it became clear we couldn't stop that offense, was crawl out my bedroom window. It would have been more satisfying had my grandmother ever realized we were gone, but at least we could tell our mother that we knew better than to aid and abet.

Soon enough, my mother recovered from her surgery if not her unwanted home makeover and resumed holding down our rearranged fort as she always had done. Those days, though, stand out on the timeline of my childhood, both for what happened and for marking our first realizations of what might happen someday. Before that, the notion that my mother could be vulnerable never entered my mind.

Yesterday, it was deja vu all over again, only I was the one riding away in the ambulance and my daughter was the one hiding out. This Saturday was a pale imitation of the original, as sequels so often are, but for once I'm relieved to not measure up. Only one police car and one ambulance arrived at our home, and if the neighbors noticed, they haven't let on. My episode proved to be insignificant, and I was home before the afternoon was over, allowing my mother enough time to take out my trash but not re-organize my kitchen. My daughter played her own version of my part, "crying [her] eyes out", she later reported, but answering what I hoped was a reassuring call down the stairs with a strong voice. How she reconciled my "I'm okay" with my walk to the ambulance, I'm not sure, but perhaps she noticed my outfit. If her mother was up and dressed that early on a weekend morning, surely nothing could really be wrong.