A Birthday is Coming for me

 

A Birthday Coming for me

When you get closer to your birthday, you start to wonder, can I make it another few days? Today is May 5, 2026. I will be 72 years old in two more days. I think my chances are good. No storms, disasters, or unknown factors heading my way. I will admit, I am tired. But more importantly, I am still moving with the help of the man, my husband who faithfully walks with me throughout the days, plays games, reads and shares his views about books he is reading, a new recipe, or an idea for a story. We have a life.

Having a life. I have stopped looking around corners, other than doctor visits, I don’t plan except for the current month. After all, massages are important and when my hair begins to need the loving attention of my hairdresser I will have an appointment on my calendar. This month is for celebrations; my friends call it my birthday month. We started the last day of April with lunch with two friends. The party continues. Lunch out on my birthday, banana cream pie to eat when the man gets it made. Other lunches are being thought of for the month. Why not?

I have been looking at writings I have done in the past. No real market for several of the essays, short stories but I like them. I told the man, I was thinking about posting them in my blog, at least, they might be looked at. By my friends for sure. The first essay is rather long. It is something I wrote about my mother. Here it is:

My Mother’s Voice is not Calling

Momma, your eyes are smiling.  Are you weeping deep inside?  Your light brown hair shines in the sunlight, which sweeps across your pillow. Thin, wasted arms and hands are settled above the white sheets and blankets. I am weeping for you, for me, for Daddy, and my little sister, and brother. Thirty years later and I am still weeping. I am struggling with every word, stopping when the memories come. I had the past buried beneath the purple lilacs by our house.  Lilacs that we placed in large mason jars to adorn your grave. Mason jars that held the gifts of the summer, which you locked up with your love and hard work to feed your growing family.  

Before that moment, you were home. You were not locked in a weakened body, kept in a nursing home, sixty miles from where your family was learning the meaning of being alone without Mother. The ALS crept up on you. Legs that had been strong, lost the race of walking across a room. Arms grew weak and trembled from the exertion of simply raising a cast iron fry pan. Arms became unable to lift small children. Weeping children who clung to a mother who was trying to be brave amidst the pain of dying. We were children who did not understand the weakness, but only wanted their mother to kiss their hurts, and give them the comfort of safety from the world.

New things appeared in our home. First a wooden cane that went everywhere like a third leg. A third leg that was useless if it fell out of reach. How long would your fallen body lie on the cool linoleum floor before you drag yourself for the phone? For your children were at school and your husband was at work. What were your thoughts? How many tears were left unshed because your strength for making them was gone?

Why was I so young and filled with misunderstanding? I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything except for the dull ache behind my eyes. Eyes blurring with unshed tears remaining echoes from the cold floor where you lay. On those days, your children would return home from the wonderment of school to find you cold on the floor. We wrapped you in blankets until we found a neighbor or daddy to help you from the ground.  Our weeping must have cut you deeply in your mothering heart. Giving you shredding, tearing open wounds that lent you no comfort. I can only hope you were warmed by the small bodies clinging to your tortured body.

The walker moved in one day. It was a cold steel thing of wonder to your children. We would argue who would bring the apparatus to you. We fought as well on who would get to dangle between the bars of steel, this aid to walking. You did not walk; you could only drag your feet closer to the front of the unyielding walker. Pushing with what little strength you had. Your determination set in the way you clenched your jaw, desperate to do one more thing alone. Heavy with your weight, our small hands worked to help move the walker. 

I never saw you crying, Momma. Not even when your son, my brother, kicked you in the stomach. He left you barely clinging to the walker. He was crying. You said he was scared and he was angry. I was angry, I cried. I hated him for hurting you, and I hated the disease that was taking you away from me. For God’s sake, I was only ten when you started losing the battle. It was a battle quickly ending for you.

  Then the hospital bed entered the living room of our home. It was a piece of furniture symbolizing no turning back.  As the bed squeezed the room, chairs stood bare, the comfortable couch became inaccessible. Just as you as a mother was becoming inaccessible in the mountain of steel and white bed sheets. Green plants retreated to unlit corners to turn gray and died. It was an end to childhood for me, your oldest child. I did what I could until Daddy came home from work each day.  Your frail body was becoming light enough for your small daughter to lift and turn for your comfort. But even in your weakness from ALS, you longed to continue to be a homemaker. I was your hands and legs around our house. I learn to cook and bake while you lay in that hospital bed. Occasionally, I went to school, picking up class assignments but staying home more often so daddy could work at his gas station.

I don’t remember the day that you left our home to go to Grandma’s house, hundreds of miles away. In many ways, you had already left. You left wounds in our hearts, the hearts of children who could not comprehend this horrible wasting away of body, leaving your mind so brilliantly clear. Leaving Daddy, alone with his heartache. Somehow this man left behind; our father had to cope with raising your children, his children. 

We couldn’t visit you; the hundreds of miles away might have been thousands.  Daddy was working hard, being father, mother, and friend. But you stayed with Grandma and your sister until the care of your body became too much for their own bodies and their health. 

One year or two years at Grandma’s, then Momma, you came home in the sense you were only sixty miles away in a nursing home. We could visit. Once every week, or twice a month, it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. A nursing home filled with sick and dying old people. Momma, you weren’t old, were you? Nearly fifty isn’t really old, is it? Momma, you weren’t old!

We filled your room with pictures, smiling, happy faces of children growing too fast. Taped to the walls where your eyes could see us; photos on the ceiling, drawings on the rails of steel around your bed. We lived everywhere in your tiny room, in our small pictures of what life should be like. Not the life of the bedridden, unable to move, unable to perform the simple functions of body elimination without the help of a kind nurse, a helping husband, or a growing child anxious to provide some token of love and caring in a physical way.  In the tiny room, you were again, the mother of our dreams. We filled up with joy hearing and seeing you. 

In your face, was “Mommy”. The mommy that held me high above her head as she sang and danced about a warm room. The mommy who hung clothes on the clothesline as I played with siblings on the grass. With your voice, you told your children how much their mommy loved them. 

As we sat with you on the hospital bed, it became the old blue van that we had traveled in on a final camping trip with just you, Momma. We did not care that the bed could barely hold all of us with our legs and feet dangling over the steel rails. The memories of joy enabled your children to believe for a moment that happy birthdays, Thanksgivings, and Christmases would return in the next year, and you would be there.

One day, the nurses ask us if we know our alphabet; of course, we do.  I am nearly fifteen, my sister is ten and our brother is eleven. The nurses tell children filled with fear of change that you have changed. Your clear, sweet voice is gone from the paralyzed structure of your wasted body. Still, you wait in your bed for the clinging hands of sorrow to grasp you, to attempt to pull you back into motion. Children’s hands, our hands, my hands reaching, hands only barely able to hold onto what is left of my mother. Our hands feel your warmth; we hear your breathing, and your eyes open and close on the only bright lights left in your life.

Momma, your voice has disappeared. Vocal cords are unable to move, along with your ability to swallow. A tube lives in your throat; it reaches into your stomach.  How can you lie so still in bed? Now we know about silence, and the tears that we let fall there. My brother and sister say the alphabet; when it’s the right letter, you blink your eyes. They gather letters in a line, searching for meaning, until you have spelled “I love my children.”

             I have forgotten my alphabet.  I’ve said it over a hundred times a day but now I cannot say my alphabet.

Her eyes are smiling. But my mother’s voice is not calling.

*****

    To see some of my current writing, please look at this sci-fi/fantasy anthology coming out on May 11, 2026 which includes one of my stories:   Feast or Famine