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Seed

Jan Marquart

    She told me to go to hell, and that she hates me, won’t call, but she wasn’t always like that. It seems so long ago now that she used to tell me how much she loved me wrapping her small arms around my neck after I tucked her in at bedtime with butterfly kisses on my cheek. I can still hear her ask me each morning to do her hair in the way she liked before leaving for the school bus, and tell me that I was her favorite person as we sat on the couch eating popcorn watching cartoons. I can remember it as if it were happening in this moment, how she’d climb the steep school bus steps, her precious pigtails curled and bouncing barely reaching her shoulders, pulled up high on her head bound with silky pink ribbons.
    I did everything I could to protect her from my life. While she was in school my days were filled with medical tests and treatments that left me fighting with all my might to make it through the day so I could see her again when the school bus pulled up to the house at the end of her day. I’d wait to hear her tiny knock on our big red front door. My daily fight behind me I knew I could no longer indulge in my illness. Now was the time to allow the joy to enter.
    She didn’t know what opening the door to her embrace and smiling face, bright as a full moon, meant to me or that I had just slid down 15 steps on my butt because I couldn’t stand up having gripped the toilet bowl vomiting up whatever chemotherapy did to my cancerous body for hours. Cancer on one end, me on the other, each fighting viciously for my life. And with all my might I was going to win, not for myself, but for my little girl, precious as could be. I wouldn’t let myself think of not being there for her. Little girls always need their moms and I wanted to be needed by her. I needed to be there for her.
    Eventually, those secretive treatments allowed me to win the fight. Losing my breast meant nothing if I could keep my life, for her sake. I’m not sure where it went wrong. Was it because she simply grew up to be her own woman? Was it because I tried too hard? No. Neither one of those reasons is good enough. Love often surprises me. It can turn so easily without warning. There is no turning back to undo the catalyst that threw everything into chaos because whatever caused it can’t be identified. Sometimes the process of daily living can make things change. Sometimes love can crack into brittle pieces. The fight to win the battle for my daughter’s sake, the seed of my heart, seems almost easier back then with all the chemotherapy treatments than the absence of her in my life now.
    I often think of my daughter. I miss her on our birthdays when we used to hug and share and laugh. I miss putting up our favorite tree ornaments and talking about bras, boys, makeup, and music. I miss her pigtails and those squeaky cartoon voices.
    I would never give up the journey we once shared. I find myself in constant hope for a rebirth of it all. Those precious memories are all I have and, for right now, I’ll savor the opening of hope for healing someday, sometime, somewhere. What else can a mother do whose daughter remains the seed of her heart?

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