When Life Circles Back Around....

I just tucked my mother into bed.

I also just spent the past little while cleaning and scrubbing and tending and taking care of her after she became unexpectedly and suddenly ill.

All the time it’s been taking place, she has been teary-eyed and apologizing, saying she’s sorry.

I keep reminding her I’ve seen worse, dealt with worse. But it doesn’t ease her mind.

While she’s sleeping, I’m spinning thoughts through my brain. While I can, while my mind is whole. I'll never take that for granted...

I can’t help feeling like somewhere along the way, I became mother and she became daughter. Or maybe, life affords us the advantage of switching things around periodically. So we more fully understand what words like “sacrifice”, “respect”, “dedication”, “commitment”, “honor” and “caring” really mean.

I haven’t seen her for several months now. And coming “home” to her presence has ignited internal conflict that I wasn’t prepared to greet.

I have the comparison of seeing my nieces and nephews, three months later; three months older; three months changed. It’s funny how we see children maturing and we welcome and embrace the leaps made. Why is it so much different then, to see changes in someone who is aging, getting older? There is a certain beauty to be found. A kind of elegance I see in her that quietly states, “No matter how scary it is, no matter how hard it is to walk or to talk or to remember moments past, I am alive and I am present and I continue to care.” I sense she is more in touch with how to let go. In touch with how to love. And how to just blurt out what needs to be said. There is some kind of strength and some kind of grace that seems to be gaining momentum within her; maybe it's simply a return to complete innocence.

But it doesn’t make it easy to accept that time keeps marching forward, with or without memory. With or without reasoning. With or without rationalization. With or without logic. With or without control.

I’m watching her sleep. Wondering how many times in my early childhood she did the same thing… Stood and lovingly watched me with my eyes closed, soft breathing that let her know I was all right.

I keep thinking life is a process of letting go and receiving in. Both being so difficult at times, so easy during other times. And I keep thinking how life feels like it is circling back on itself somehow. Where the child cares for the parent. Yet there is a lingering, long-ago-and-hard-to-reach-back-for memory of the parent caring for the child. Folding in on itself until it’s hard to know who is the child and who is the parent.

I don’t understand it.

I can’t.

I can’t even try.

All I can do is experience and move through the circle….