By Deezee

The phone rings, the olive green push button phone sitting upon the antique dark wood corner table in the room we call ‘library,’ and I reach to answer it with ten-year-old hands.

“Hello?” I say. At the other end of the line is my grandmother, my mother’s mother. She tells me that my mom is coming home that day.

“Be good for your mother,” she injects somewhere in the conversation.

Essentially, I’m to take care of my mom, to not cause any trouble, to not be ten. I hang up the phone and call my father. I tell him about the phone call, and he gets angry. He steps in to intercede, to put my grandmother in her place, but I’ve already been given my role. I may resent it, I may note that something is off, but life has been off for a few years. I imagine my mom back at home, my mom who’s been off mending for two months, my mom who had to disappear into a mental hospital and not be a mom.

Now that she’s coming home, she’s not really coming home as a mom. I am the sole person living with her. My siblings are away at school. My dad will return to the apartment he’s had since their separation. My grandparents live down the road. At ten I become a parent.

Don’t make waves. Others can’t handle what you can. Everyone else is fragile, on the brink, at risk. I become a rock needing nothing, demanding nothing, voicing nothing. My path in the world is set. I can handle more so I become nursemaid to the wounded. And suddenly I see everyone as wounded or at least I see everyone’s wounds. And they see me as protector, as trouble free, as caregiver. My own vulnerability disappears beneath my layers of iron. I proudly wear the label of self-sufficient, low maintenance, non-neurotic. In a land of neuroses I beam. That is until I realize that I tell no one anything. I am such a tight and tough fortress that no one would ever know if I hurt. I barely acknowledge my own ailments, for I still see myself as tougher, more solid.

My mother arrives home. She is bone thin. She speaks softly. She looks glazed. I don’t know how to navigate around this shell of a person, but I do as I was told. I don’t make waves.