I Want My Mommy

Imagine one of these slamming into your mother.

Just imagine it. Imagine your mother innocently stepping out onto 1st avenue, holding her arm out for a taxi that didn't appear to be coming, when suddenly, she finds herself hurtling through the air? She sees the above-pictured monster stopping just ahead of her, and suddenly finds herself looking up a Circle of Faces. The faces are all looking at her leg, which is apparently in a position no leg should ever see. She realizes her back suddenly hurts like a bitch. She screams "I'm dying!" then starts reciting your father's cell phone number.

And then you hear all this six hours later, two days before your birthday. And you go to meet your mom in the ER and her eye looks like... well, the closest I can come is this, but slightly grusomer, and also, it's your mother (her eye is improving steadily. Every day it's a smaller patch of black. She says she's stopped caring, though, and prefers to focus on the broken rib pain). And she's strung out on morphine and her leg is in traction and, although a few days later she'll be strolling around with just a walker and three surgical scars (from where they put a titanium fucking rod in her leg), at the time we're talking wheelchairs, laptops, multiple operations.

Mom is not a great sick person--she's spent too much time with her hypochondriac mother and on medical websites (and, of course, that year in medical sciences grad school), so she's often second-guessing people and worrying about stuff. Her roommate, one day (it's been a rotating cast) had leukemia, and cancer is her kryptonite. Her previous roommate had mistaken her for a large African-American burglar.

Mom also is having her own major mommy issues right now--as I mentioned, her mom is basically impossible to communciate with right now, so as of right now, she [grandma] has no clue about mom's accident. And, of course, my mommy wants her mommy, but her mommy seriously can't leave the house, and would also freak out because hypochondriac agoraphobe, but would have to freak out silently and internally, because unable to speak.

The worst of it is, of course, my internship has decided that this is the week to make me the delivery girl. So I spend half my day walking through the sweltering heat through traffic-y Soho streets, to the Hamptons Film Festival office and to a Mailboxes, Etc. and to a deli to buy 4 liters of water (fucking heavy). And I'm doing all this, which is irritating enough when I don't have a hearty fear of cars, with a hearty fear of cars.

In conclusion, I wish mom were healthy, but if she were, I wouldn't need her right now. Catch-22, 23-skidoo, 24 is the most addictive show on television, 25 is the silver anniversary.