She lets go of my hand and stands up from the couch. “I want to start off by doing a few range of motion exercises so I can gauge what type of PT we want to start with.”
Olivia busies herself digging through the duffle bag of supplies she brought with her. She pulls out something that looks like a giant protractor as well as a rolled up yoga mat. She unfolds the mat on the floor, patting it as she looks back over her shoulder at me.
I pull myself up from the couch using my crutches and try not to let the anger I’m feeling show on my face as I make my way over to her. Olivia helps me get down on my back on top of the mat before ripping off the four large pieces of Velcro holding my knee brace in place, explaining what she’s going to do to me as she removes the brace and sets it off to the side.
I let the feel of her hands on my leg as she lifts it off the mat and bends it into different positions and the soft cadence of her voice calm my anger. I wanted to keep Olivia to myself for a while. I didn’t want anyone meddling or trying to ruin my attempts at forgiveness. Unfortunately, there’s no way out of the confrontation now. My mother has a lot to fucking answer for. I’ll give Olivia the time she needs to tell me what happened in her own way, but there is no way in hell I’m giving my mother that same luxury.
If she was the cause of any of Olivia’s problems while I was gone, I will never forgive her.
GROWING UP POOR, you never really realize as a child that you are poor. You live in a run-down apartment complex using bed sheets as curtains, you have to wait until the first of the month when the welfare check comes in to buy groceries and all of your clothes are permanently stained from the last eight children who owned them because you take what you can when you shop at Goodwill. You’re surrounded by others who are in the exact same situation as you and it all just seems normal; like everyone lives this way and that makes it okay. It’s not until you start school, seeing the other kids in their fancy clothes and finding out their homes have actual front yards and pools and curtains made out of fine Italian fabric instead of threadbare Scooby-Doo, that you realize you’re different. You’re different in a way that makes everyone look down on you, makes them avoid you for fear that your pathetic way of living will rub off on them.
I don’t know who my father was and, judging by the sheer volume of men my mother paraded through our tiny apartment, it could have been just about anyone in the greater DC area. My mother’s pale skin and thin, light brown hair completely contrasted with my olive complexion and thick mane of black hair, proving that my father was most likely of Indian descent. Until I started school, I assumed everyone only had one parent and that it was perfectly normal to have a mother who slept all day and frequently forgot that she had a little person to take care of and feed. By age three, I’d learned to run a bath and clean myself, at four I taught myself to cook Ramen noodles and by the time I was five, I was an expert at cleaning up my mother’s vomit and helping her through withdrawals once a week when she couldn’t scrounge up enough money to get whatever fix she needed at the time.
By the time I was in high school, I was a full-fledged adult who worked a part-time job, paid all of the bills, forged my mother’s signature on school documents and skipped out on the handful of parties and proms I was invited to because I couldn’t leave my mother alone to choke on her own vomit or get the shit kicked out of her by her dealer when she couldn’t come up with the money she owed him. Given how I spent my formative years, one would think that I’d choose a profession as far away from the caretaking field as I could possibly get, but I realized quickly that I am good at taking care of people. The days I spent helping my mother take a bath or sitting up with her as DTs wracked her body or forcing her to get up and put food in her stomach instead of crushed pills up her nose or syringes in her veins were the days that I felt most proud of myself and what I’d managed to accomplish. I like how helping someone get better and motivating them to work harder makes me feel. Taking care of my mother was like my own personal addiction. Every time she relapsed, instead of getting frustrated or sobbing at the unfairness of my situation, I became more motivated, thinking of new ways to get her to change her life around. Her sobriety lasted for a few days and then she’d immediately fall right back down the rabbit hole and I’d start all over again, thinking about what I could do differently the next time. It was a never-ending cycle and, even though I failed each and every time with her, I knew as soon as I filled out college applications that taking care of people is what I was meant to do.
Even my mother’s death during my senior year of high school didn’t stop my forward momentum. I’d finally run out of ideas and she’d finally stopped giving a shit about herself. I was never under any kind of illusion that she cared about me. I was just another body who shared her living space and pissed her off when I dragged her out of her sweat and puke stained sheets. I wasn’t even surprised when I came home that day in January to find her sprawled in the middle of the living room, her lips blue, her skin cold to the touch and the empty syringe still stuck in her arm. What surprised me was the fact that it hadn’t happened sooner. Every single day of my life, I walked through that front door prepared for the inevitable. Once again, I didn’t break down and cry for the mother I’d never had; I called an ambulance, got to work cleaning up the urine and feces left behind on the living room carpet and said a prayer of gratitude that my mother waited until I was eighteen to take that final, deadly hit of heroin. There would be no foster care or shitty group home for me, thank God. I was an adult who’d been taking care of myself my entire life, so her absence didn’t even make a dent in my daily routine.