On Becoming An Adult

I used to have this theory about adulthood, that you aren’t actually a for-keeps, responsibility-driven, “adult” until one or two things happened.

  1. You have a child.
  2. Your parents die.

It was a convenient theory because the day after my eighteenth birthday I moved to New York, three thousand miles away from anyone I knew. Normally, this would have the event that triggered entrance to the world of “adults,” but I wasn’t ready to claim that title and its attendant responsibilities (Who is at eighteen?). So, I crafted a sort of bill-paying, binge-drinking, working full-time and going to school full-time pseudo-adolescence for myself. It carried me through conservatory, college and almost a full year out in “the real world.” I could fuck-up (within reason) all I wanted because this was not yet my Official Adult Life. Nothing counted, yet.  Given the fact that I was committed to never having children and my mom was still young, I thought this maturing theory would give me a couple decades of freedom.

Then, one spring night, my forty-four year old mother had a massive brain hemorrhage.

Learn it. Live it.

Looking back it’s insane that we all didn’t see it coming. Well, no, correction, I DID see something coming. She was having at least one nosebleed a day paired with crippling headaches and she kept going to the same doctor and urgent care provider who told her one ridiculous tale after another. My mom is a head-in-the-sand kind of lady, so she never sought out a second opinion. We had a huge fight about it, about two weeks before the stroke. But, like most fights between mothers and daughters, nothing was resolved.

I was in D.C. when it happened. I traveled for work and instead of going all the way home to Seattle, I decided to stay and spend the weekend catching up with some college friends. We got stunningly drunk. I made it back to my hotel room around three or four in the morning. Just as my beginning-to-pound head touched the pillow, my phone, that was on the desk, on other side of the room, began to ring. Before I could even make the decision to ignore it, I was asleep.

Two hours later it rang again.

Through the thick, pain-soaked, ears ringing haze I sensed the doom that goes along with all late night phone calls. I drug myself across the room to answer. It was my uncle’s voice, telling me to get home as soon as possible, the ER doctors couldn’t stop the bleeding and that my mom was probably going to die. Soon. My family is nothing if not blunt.

I could write several separate pieces about everything that happened in the next ninety minutes. How to arrange grieving flight travel. How to deal when the guy you’re dating, who is in the place you’re going, refuses to just pick you up at the airport and drop you off at the hospital so your family can stay put, because he has Laker’s tickets. How to not curl into a ball on the dirty hotel carpet and cry until you pass out. How to manage all of this when you have The Worst Hangover You Have Ever Had In Your Life.

This is what emotional puberty looks like.

I made it in time. D.C to L.A. in about eight hours door-to-door and my mom was still alive. My grandma and I lived in the ICU for the next few days. There are so many things about strokes you don’t know about until they hit you in the face. One of the big ICU recovery benchmarks after a stroke is a “swallow test.” My grandma and uncle abandoned ship. They couldn’t deal with seeing  mom possibly choke on some water. It was just me, her, the nurse and about a gallon of my terror-induced sweat.

She drifted in an out of consciousness for the next few days. The only person she recognized in midst of her delirium was my grandma. That was fine with me. I don’t think I could have dealt with my mom calling out to me for help. It was bad enough being the unspoken point person.

Things improved steadily within the next ten days, except that her entire right side was paralyzed. Two different rehab centers, thousands of hours of therapy and time have not significantly improved the situation. She can walk short distances with a cane and take care of almost everything herself inside the house, but she is disabled, confined mostly to a wheelchair, and probably will be for the rest of her life.

There is only about a twenty year age difference between my mom and I. This seems astronomical when you are five, not so much when you are twenty-four. I love and like her dearly. This is a very good thing because she (and my grandma) will be living with me, within three or four years of my graduation from law school, for the rest of their lives.

I can count on one hand the years left of my life where I can just float around, sleep late, bring men home, study whenever I want, come home late, hell, just BE alone whenever and for however long I want.  It’s like knowing almost the exact date you will one day wake up instantly married with kids.

I don’t mean to sound bitter; it’s just overwhelming to see it in writing. Mostly because, while I am a Type-A, obsessive compulsive, I am also a free spirit. I never planned to “settle down.” I loved being able to pick up and run back and forth across the country. I had hopes of being able to run across the world a few times. Sure, it still could happen, but it will require a lot more planning than just popping over to the North Face store for a large backpack.

However, the worst moment of my life was thinking I was going to be on some stupid fucking airplane when my mom died. I consider everything that isn’t that, the last three years of adjusting, the next decade of planning (and more adjusting), my accelerated membership into adulthood, all a fair trade for the continued presence in my life of the woman who regularly emails me pictures of baby koalas.

Seriously? Look at that! That is totally worth all the yelling at real-estate agents I’m going to have to do in Seattle, land of hills and stairs. ” What part of “HANDI-CAP ACCESSIBLE” do you not understand?! I’m not paying you a commission to show me fucking stairs!”

 

 

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