Just breathe

Everyone keeps telling me to just breathe.

I walked out to my car this morning in 45 degree weather and there was a woman on the side of the street in Bermuda shorts and imitation Ugg slippers having a conversation with the voices in her head. She had the same distant, unfocused look in her eyes that my mother now has.

This woman walked back and forth between a few plastic grocery bags that were strewn about around her, and she wrung her hands like she was trying desperately to prove a point.  I tried to make eye contact as I drove past her but she didn’t even notice me. Could she notice anyone at all, I wondered.  Did she have anywhere to go?

This could be my mother when her unemployment checks run out. My mother could be homeless, cold, pleading with the voices in her head.  Do I do anything? I have to protect myself too. Just breathe.

Last night it was pointed out to me that I care. There’s no rational reason for me to be stressed about any of this, I told my therapist. She looked at me in shock.  There’s every rational reason for you to be stressed about all of this. She’s your family. You care about her.

That was really the first time I thought about it that way. As a child, whatever I felt toward my mother was taken for granted.  I was expected to love her and to care about her. I never stopped to wonder about what I actually felt for her.

Telling myself that I don’t care about my mother makes everything that’s happened since August easier to process. If I don’t care about her, then I don’t care if she’s wandering the streets at 2 in the morning without rhyme or reason in the freezing cold. If I don’t care about her, then I don’t care that she doesn’t sleep more than a few hours a night anymore, that she chain smokes for the majority of her waking hours, and that she no longer remembers what the days of the week are or what 3 o’clock in the morning means. It’s easier to go about my own life when I “don’t care.”

But my body is smarter than my mind. Of course you care, you idiot, it tells me. If you didn’t care, why are you having such trouble breathing lately? Where are these hives coming from?

I am physically having trouble taking air into my lungs because of tension.

I am terrified.

What if, after my mother’s unemployment run out, she asks to stay with me?  I know I will have to refuse her.  Then will my mother become that crazy woman on the street shouting into oblivion?

My heart is in fragments.

- Leila

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