Date sent:        Thu, 7 Aug 1997 18:11:07 -0400 (EDT)
From:             AgntSabine@aol.com
Subject:          New: My Mother's Hands (1/1)


Title: My Mother's Hands (1/1)
Author: Sabine (AgntSabine@aol.com)
Rating: PG-13
Category: V, A, vague M/S UST
Spoilers: 4th season, BIG time!!!

Disclaimer: I told CC that I'd show him mine if he showed me his, but there
are rumors I'll have to wait until mid-November to see his if he kept his end
of the deal. Meanwhile, you be the judge.

Summary: None

Thanks:  to Jill for her time, her talent and her kind words, to Punk M. for
making me laugh, to Leyla for making me cry and to GA for ignoring that this
plot twist ever happened. 

**This piece is dedicated to: My Wonderwoman without whom, my life would be
superhero-less**

Ok to archive, OK to forward to atxc with name and addy attatched.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~





My Mother's Hands (1/1)
by Sabine

In the moments when I feel Death drumming his coal-heavy fingers on the
newly-filled hollow between my eyes, I cry for my mother. She has remained
unbroken through early and unwelcome demise.

My world is double-padded these days with the warm hush of morphine and the
steady gaze of my mother's dark eyes. Her soft face flickers before me,
sentient and smiling. My moments of sheer terror are quieted by her familiar
voice; I am able to ride the panic-wave with dignity if not grace. Like a
thick red fog, she carpets my back, allowing no room for the agony of a
defeated self. We watch together, adult and child no longer distinguishable
under the velvet curtain of my illness, hands tightly clenched. With the
moonwashed faces of skygazers, we watch my death inexorably approach. 

My world is warm applesauce and icecubes. Tinny Mozart strained through the
cheap foam of worn headphones. It is _Little Women_ read aloud and the
weather channel turned low for a bit of white noise. My nights are
slow-moving talk-circles, my lips too weirdly numb to keep the flow of
conversation direct, but she follows me, this remarkable woman, onto the
thin-twig tangents I put forth as communication. She delights me with a wit I
never knew as a living being. Any tale to keep my face unlined and my eyes
worry-free. Tales of my father's courtship, images of my impossibly alive
sister wriggling in the grasp of her family's stern beliefs, memories of my
babyhood antics.

She reminds me, my mother, of my incorrigible partner, his idiot grin
cracking his face in two. Of my Mulder, his troubled face solemn in the
peacelight of my trust.

My mother warms me with her fading hands as only she can do.

When she thinks I am asleep, though, her breath on my face is bitter with
wonder, with suppressed questions. With the smell of a smoking gun so near
her sleeping daughter's bedstead, my mother cannot commit me to the heaven
she knows is waiting.  Her breathing is ragged with unburdened grief. I can
feel her unsettled communion through my thin skin, into the poisoned space of
my forehead. Her sorrow grows sharp when I am resting. For now, she transfers
her subtle power to my damaged soul.

But I know that when I go, she will crumble. This knowledge is enough to keep
me here another morning, through another mealtime, through the time of day
when I know the bustle of hospital activity would feel the most unforgiving
to a mother with a dying daughter. I cannot yet condemn her to a world of
photocrisp nostalgia and baby clothes that no longer smell powdery and
innocent. My brothers will not be enough, I understand. Their families and
extended families, their boyish grins and uncomfortable silences, their
strained Thanksgiving sentiments - all these things will merely soften the
weight upon my mother's back like the unbuttoning of a fitted skirt after
Mass on a humid Sunday afternoon. 

I would change everything for her if I had the strength or the time. My
mother's reality has become the unfastening of her family, one member at a
time, from their breakhold on life. On odd days, I can see the encroaching
shriek that forms upon her lips as I struggle to swallow water through a
hospital flexi-straw. Her eyes roll skyward from the effort, but she keeps it
all in as she leans to adjust my blanket. 

She is strong for me. She is strong for *me.*

As I weaken, my whimpers are audio-coded to coax humor or comfort from my
mother's lips. One cogent moment has my mother bringing me sights and smells
to tempt me back to the living world. Things only my mother would think of. A
handful of cotton balls to soothe my ragged skin, my father's handkerchief to
tug at my memory. Once, only once, the pilly comfort of Mulder's NY Knicks
T-shirt. I cry, then, the hollow pat of my tears on my mother's
white-knuckled hands a living testament to the unfathomable grief we share.
My mother's mouth is in an upside-down bow of concern, her clean cheek
pressed to my face. She is humming to me, tirelessly, her throat catching on
the low notes. Her voice is the same throughout eternity, the throat-choir
that hovered above my crib, my childhood sickbed, on long car trips from one
Navy base to the next. It has never before sounded so close to soundlessness.


She has been here forever, my mother. She began my universe 34 years ago and
is brave enough to hold my hand at the gate's end, the same as she did with
my daddy and my sister.  She is the embodiment of a windless howl, her terror
set aside with a practiced yet sincere smile. My mother staves off the dogs
of Hell and the angels of God alike with the strength of her undying faith.
Faith in a God that would take everything away from her in the span of a
dog's life. Faith in me, in my choices, in my need to escape a life cruel
enough to leave a woman childless after years of secretly hoping for
motherhood, a man sisterless after a lifetime of deadly pursuit.

I catch her staring at me with a look somewhere between fear and
hopelessness.

I wonder, now, where she goes between the cafeteria and the women's room. How
she faces this life, present tense. When I am tossing and turning on the
cramped axis of my coccyx, mumbling with the incoherence of a painkiller
drunkard, does she empty her heart of loss? Can she relentlessly plan the
garage sales of the future? Does she arrange my belongings in order of
necessity and disbelief, imagining herself in heavy black shoes on an
overgreen carpet of grass? My clothes, slightly used suits in an astonishing
array of charcoal and the occasional shimmer of colored silk waterfalling on
the summer lawn, $5 apiece, their shrunken size-4 labels a whispering
tattletale of the person who used to be...me. 

Desperately, inside, I imagine my mother as a butch vigilante road warrior,
her dark hair pulled back with the help of my shorn apron strings. The sale
of my houseware, Melissa's New Age recipe books and my father's numerous
medals funding her trip from D.C. to New Mexico, Billie Holiday and B.B. King
wailing lazily from the quadraphonic stereo of my mother's candy apple Caddy.
She takes on no passengers. 

When I am gone, my mother will remain. She will be the only conveyor of the
Truth, the dreams I held as an adult child. My Faith in this world -- its
sorrows and hopes -- will be etched in the flesh of my mother's hands.

***************************
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