Compression

I find myself surprisingly unperturbed.
It may not have hit me yet, sometimes it takes a little while.
Things have been much better and I have begun to work on expansion, rather than constant contraction. But as soon as I begin to get a little bit comfortable, along comes the next challenge. So, yesterday my mother came home from her PET scan---I did not accompany her because I got a slight cold over last weekend and I'm still fighting it off---and told me that it showed she now has spinal cord compression (tumors pressing into her spinal cord). Up until now, despite the total collapse of her spine, she was alright in this regard. Now, of course, she is in a very risky situation; her oncologist wanted to admit her to the hospital right away so that they could keep an eye on her and do lots more tests. However, she said she would rather be at home where at least she feels comfortable and happy. There isn't actually anything that they can do for her in the hospital at the moment other than monitoring her. It basically makes their job easier, but wouldn't actually help my mother in any tangible way. She will probably have to undergo another series of radiation treatments. This will be the second in a matter of a couple of months. Just recently they radiated the breast and the hip for a month and she just recovered from those daily treatments. Before that it was the brain for three weeks. Now it will be the spine itself. The upside is that she has historically responded well to radiation (i.e. the tumors have shrunk) and the side effects are relatively minor compared with what they could be.
One thing that truly upsets me is that my mother gets so scared that I'm going to leave her. I feel like she should know by now (it's been about 21 months) that there's no way I would give up on her, ever. I was planning a trip to Europe, to the Czech Republic and the UK, to meet the family I have but did not know existed. I was told that the Nazis had wiped them all out, which is what my family believed until this other branch found us in the National Archives. She was saying to me this morning that she was afraid of me leaving. Perhaps this is on some level why this keeps on happening. Perhaps she has to learn that I love her so much that there's no way in hell I would ever leave her if she felt uncomfortable with it. I wonder when she'll understand that?
I look at her and I see a baby. I would never leave a baby and so I would never leave her. Only when the baby truly is capable of looking after itself would I begin to let go. So there it is. I can't help it, when I look at her little face I see a baby who needs me. I used to have a lot of nightmares when I was a teenager that I had given birth to an underweight baby and I still wanted to party and hang out with my friends and I had no idea how to look after it. The dream wasn't always exactly the same, sometimes the baby was dead in its crib like the baby in Trainspotting, sometimes it was in my arms and it was very frail and looked up into my eyes beseechingly as I put it down. It would look up at me from this tiny pinched baby face and meagre body with wise, knowing eyes. Sometimes I could smell its breath, a rotting, malnourished smell and I would wake up gagging.
In Gestalt Psychotherapy, which my mother trained in for three years when I was----you guessed it----a baby, you enter your dream and see each part of it as your own self. So I would act out the part of the baby and the teenage mother. I would go into each part and speak as the voice of the 'character'. I've worked on this dream in this way and I can certainly see myself in both roles. In fact, the eyes of the baby look a lot like my own did. I was not nearly so emaciated, but there was a lot of deprivation in my childhood. My mother was working like a maniac when I was an infant and during her pregnancy because my father was not making a living and she was also physically frightened of him, so she wanted to be out of the home as much as possible. I had some wonderful babysitters, mostly lesbians and models. The former would take me to parties and museums and the latter would bring me to castings and such and let me play with their makeup. But there were also some awful places. I remember this one daycare I went to in an Indian family's house where there were a lot of children who were mostly older than me and played rough. No one would actually watch us. I mostly stared at the fish in the aquarium, which gave me hours of fascination and kept me out of their way because they were all glued to the TV. However, I remember once one of the older girls who had long nails poked my eye and I got an eye infection. I don't know what it was about, I just remember how frightening that place was. Also, our house was way below legal sanitary living standards. We lived in a basement and sub-basement and it was full of rats and ghosts, with whom I frequently interacted. The outside of the building was covered in crackheads in various states of disrepair. They knew who we were and I had frequent interaction with them, too. Mostly fine, but once one of them pulled a knife out on me and told me he was going to "Get the bitch outta me"(he didn't manage that one!), which was almost as bad as getting my eye poked with those nasty long nails. Anyway, the point of all this is not very clear, it's more of a rant than anything else, but I would like to make it clear that I'm not upset about any of it. I take it all as the pieces that have made up who I am and I'm constantly working at overcoming the grime and there is an awful lot of it around, let's face it. I'm happy with where I am and I'm happy to be able to face all of this nasty stuff that's going on in my mother's body and love her more and more every day. I want to make sure that I would not leave that baby under any circumstances, no matter how scared I was for my own survival. That baby is inextricably a part of me.