The third book, and Mom’s waltz

I found it, the third book. Maybe it found me. Maybe we found each other yesterday as I was shifting things from room to room, making way for the hospital bed about to be delivered. It was inside of a plastic bin I was moving from upstairs to down — wait, what’s this? Some pages inside of an orange folder.

I began to flip through them. Began to laugh. This is what she told me she was almost afraid I’d find one day. This is the one she’d called “crap.”

But Mom: on this otherwise awful day, a painful day when you slipped further away and towards your next chapter, somehow you gave me this. Laughter. And your light.

Your playfulness and whimsy.

It was still here. Right here.

In a book titled, Tub.

~

“Oh, it’s nothing. It was just something small, inspired by conversations with my friends here,” Mom said. “Always some stupid drama with men.”

That’s all she’d told me then. She did not mention if she herself was in any of the stories. Yet …

How much of this is her, and how much of this is her friends, I’ll never now know. But I remember her saying to me, “A woman without wisdom is the worst.” And her own wisdom, she said, needed about ten years to fully mature, after that breakup with Jerzy. By then she’d finally become “a sage woman” compared to her friends, she said, who were still calling her with their stories, and for advice. By then — I think also — she had probably given up on the idea of any more relationships for herself. This always saddened me a little. But then, if I ever asked or poked around about that topic, she would just kind of laugh and say, I have my pets. Rocky, and then her cats — now there are some love stories.

And there were bigger problems. Cancer.

The first one came in 2013 — colon. She beat it.

The second came a bit later — salivary gland. Beat it.

The third, uterine. Beat it.

Then there was that hernia operation, and the awful complications thereafter, which made this episode the worst of them all actually. But she beat it. We beat it. We always managed to beat these things together.

While Mom’s phone would still sometimes ring. Her friends. Those problems.

Maybe her wisdom came with context.

Or maybe she just wanted to play …