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One afternoon when I was young, in h school, I heard myroo the receiver in one hand and her skull in the other “Hi, yes, I threw up,” I heard her say in a weak voice “My head hurts, too I , and hit it on the side of the coffee table”

I listened as my mother described her urine flow and whether there was blood in her stool I heard her shout weakly upstairs, past me, past the banister, to my middle sister “I need you to drive me to the hospital After I take a shower”

By the time my mother had finished her shower, my middle sister had conveniently “fallen asleep,” her response to ent request for help She’d shut her bedroom door, which my mother and I both knewher violence Even asfor help, she continued pretending she’d fallen so solidly asleep that she couldn’t hear a thing So my mother took me with her to the hospital, instead, in a cab I spent all day waiting at the hospital, and then into the night Nurses tookas they led her away, and there was nothing to do but to wait and worry I had brought eometry textbook with me, tried to study for school, but failed to concentrate I began hating hospitals at that point in , pale, overly lit shells of buildings During that tithe machine spurt out two streams of liquid into a paper cup

When ed, after we transferred to another hospital and then got in a cab to go ho of what had happened The cabdriver looked at her and asked if she was going to get sick on the drive ho, to which she shook her head I felt as though I were sitting next to a child

Only when my mother called my oldest sister, her own sister, and my father, did I learn what had happened “It was a mini-seizure, they think Or maybe a mini-stroke They’re not sure But they say I’m fine now”

At hoht past us My middle sister and I lived in different worlds when it came to my mother For my middle sister, my mother was responsible for her happiness I, on the other hand, felt I had to look out forit, and my mother was not happy

Mothers have historically been cultural transmitters We look to our mothers to teach us how to be

“Mothers will do anything for their children,” someone once told ue, but as the point? If there’s anything people assume to be universal, it’s a mother’s love That hadn’t been —erased, in the delayed recognition of illness Aftereffect is another

When you’re young, you look to your mother for future possibilities, and in her case, I saw decline I hungered for the accuradually stripped of it I i the same trajectory as her I wanted to fill myself up to the brim with experience first I learned later that, as ater from a cup, experiences spill over, displaced by otten so much

My parents seemed to believe in the myth of education—that armed with one of sufficient quality, soave little advice on how to be a good person, or how to ood enough schooling, ould all figure out the rest It’s hard to overcoh, which is more primal and more fundamental than any lessons learned in the outside world

7 BUBBLE WRAPS

Money existed in an odd orbit in our household On the one hand, there was s we didn’t necessarily want, like private music lessons, and always for school necessities, like AP exae application fees On the other hand, I was always hungry at home, fro the sanize the sorts of neglect n of my mother’s illness, more than an element of class Whether we had money was a different question than whether there was an adult able to spend it as a parent ht usually

There was no constancy or logic to how money was handled in my household We had it for pet projects of my parents’, the random tennis lesson or the music lessons my mother insisted on for us Education costs were always seen as essential, not optional, regardless of subject matter But we often didn’t have money for basics that others readily spentclothes, eating out, or entertainment