Dear Sanity, Please Come Back
“I’m scared,” Mom says.
She glances up meekly through dejected eyes, but Emily can tell she’s looking past her, not at her. One hand fidgets at her side while the other fusses with her graying hair. Emily has never seen her mother look so small and frail.
“Why are you scared?”
She looks down at her feet, which are slipped into pink fleece slippers with stitched rabbits adorning each, then back up past me. The way she’s standing there, timid and forlorn, reminds Emily of a child, not a grown woman.
“Can’t eat or sleep.”
It shows. Her face is pallid, and Emily can see the dark circles under her eyes from a lack of sleep, how her cheekbones protrude out of her gaunt face. Frown lines tug at the corners of her mouth, and worry lines make marked furrows on her forehead.
“Why not?”
The creases in her forehead deepen as she ponders the question. She looks up to the ceiling, as if the answer to her life and everything will magically appear from the heavens. That’s all she does nowadays – she looks for the answers in other places, turning to others but never figuring them out for herself.
“I’m worried.”
Now Emily can’t tell where her mother is looking. Mom’s eyes dart back and forth, like they’re trying to track down every anxious thought and worrisome feeling as it travels through her mind.
“What are you worried about?”
She won’t look at Emily, but intently focuses on screwing and unscrewing the cap of her pill bottle. When that bores her, she starts incessantly picking at her fingernails. Emily puts her hands on her mother’s to make her stop.
“Everything,” Mom sighs.
She’s doing that thing again where she gives purposely vague, angst-filled responses and expects me to read her mind, Emily thinks. She can never answer a question directly, as usual.
“What’s everything?”
Mom pulls herself away from Emily’s touch, as if the two of them are suddenly strangers. Emily shifts uncomfortably in her chair.
“I’m a bad mother – can’t work, can’t take care of you. Can’t remember anything. I’m a mess.”
Emily doesn’t know what to say any more. They’ve had this conversation so many times over the past few months, and it always goes as follows: Mom sits on Emily’s bed as she’s doing work and asks Emily to talk to her, out of pity Emily will comply, and then the same lines of dialogue are exchanged in the same rote manner. It always ends with Mom saying that she’s a mess, a wreck, a failure. Emily knows that it’s not her mother who is saying these things; it isn’t her mother that she’s looking at. It’s her, the depressed person who has taken over Mom’s life. But sometimes the line that separates the two of them gets kind of blurry, and Emily forgets who is who.
“Can you help me?”
How is Emily supposed to help her? Emily cannot help someone who won’t help herself. Time and time again Emily has listened as Mom cries about how she feels like she’s slipping away, she lets Mom follow her around like a lost puppy dog so that her mother doesn’t feel quite so lonely, she suggests who Mom should see so she can get her life back on track. But all Mom does is stand in Emily’s doorway, looking at her through those haunting, sorrowful eyes or sit on the frayed pea-green couch in the living room and clutch the flowered pillow to her chest, rocking back and forth and repeating the same lines over and over again.
Emily says nothing in response. There are no words left.
“I’m sorry,” Mom says.
Emily is too. Feeling like your mother is ruining your life is something that your typical teenage girl might go through, but seeing your mother slowly ruin her own is something completely different. Emily wants to respect Mom, but it’s awfully hard to respect someone who has no feeling of self-worth. She used to be Emily’s role model: strong, confident, and happy. Yet Emily looks for that woman she once admired, and now all she sees is a sad, empty sack of a person, an afterthought of a vibrant being that once was. And it hurts, because she wants her mother back.
Emily is scared too.