“Why aren’t you eating?” my mother asked me, her Yonkers accent ringing out in the hushed atmosphere of the Chinese restaurant. The 77-year-old Italian-born hairdresser was convinced that almost any problem could be solved with a pile of spaghetti and meatballs, so she considered my lack of appetite a red flag.
“I’m fine, I answered. It’s just that my sesame chicken has a funny taste of pepper.”
She gestured to the waiter. “My son can’t eat spices because of his leukemia”, she called.
I had survived cancer when I was a kid, but now I was about to die of shame. At 40, I had gotten used to being overprotected by my mother. I understood at a very young age that, as the youngest of her four children and the only one to have had a life-threatening illness, she and I would always be bound by love and fear.
Can’t we move on?
I accepted her covering me with sunscreen at the beach, even when I was a teenager. I didn’t protest if she insisted on playing chaperone during my elementary school trips or accompanying me when I entered college. On the other hand, I had always hated her always talking about my illness to others, especially now, because it made it seem like I was still sick.
“Mom, I’ve been in remission for thirty years, I sighed. Can’t we move on?
“Sorry, I didn’t know it bothered you so much.
“I told you a hundred times that I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“You should be proud to have survived. Why are you acting like it’s something shameful?”
She might have been right, but I never liked discussing what I had been through. It had been easier in more ways than one to fight the disease than to deal with its long-term side effects: the nightmares of having sharp needles thrust into my spine, the pain of being teased by my school friends when I lost my hair, the fear that a visit to the doctor would bring the news that I was no longer in remission.
The one that lightens the atmosphere
Even though my mother’s behavior made me blush, I envied her because she seemed to manage my illness better than me. The first time I was hospitalized, my mother insinuated herself between the doctors and the nurses; she would have put on a lab coat and taken my blood if we’d let her. She spent the next few days glued to medical students coaching them on which veins to use. “Not the right hand ones, they roll.”
She introduced pizza and bolognese sandwiches when I refused
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