Contraction:  a stage in wound healing; to pull back; to lessen the space.

22 pills a day.  Well, 22 and a half if you count the one needed only when, well, needed.  22 pills, two breathing medications, oxygen and another device to help my mother breathe.  I sit and watch her chest heave up and down-indicative of the lungs below working so hard for a simple breath.  She sits on the deck soaking up every last ray of southern sun and in between sips of Coke, she lights up another cigarette.  She is quiet-no longer has her book of the week by her side-she is just there, sitting in the sun. She eats very little and nods off from time to time-twitching here and there. I watch her and my own daughter sits and watches me-watching my mother.  It is a generational force of what is and what is to be. It has been just us three for three days now.  I am mom to my daughter, caretaker to my mother and wife to the husband who is back home and somewhere in there- a self I am trying to figure out-in my season of contraction. Not even a master multi-task-er could do this and have something left. 

“Pretty nice front yard”, my mom says, looking out to a blue, green ocean in the midst of a tide change.  “There might be pools today”, she says to my daughter.  And then she is quiet again, head thrown back for full sun advantage.  She is the only woman I know who had a face lift-way back when-and pretty much ruined it because she chose the sun instead. Now the same steel blue eyes are surrounded by a weathered and many times tanned face that never even knew of a face lift. She no longer walks on the beach.  In fact, it is a rarity for her to leave the porch.  She just wants to sit in the sun, smoke and drink Cokes. In the small cans please.  Not the bottles.  Does my daughter, all of 7 and ready to go jump in the waves again, see this will be her years from now?  Tending to me as I have little left.  Will she be brave enough to ask me all the unanswered questions.  Will she be just as afraid?  Will she not know the right things to say too?

As it happens for me, I am not only in the deep blue of knowing my mother is going to die-but also in the deep end of my own life.  If I was ever in the season of expansion in my 20’s, and 30’s, expand I did.  I look back with full knowing this was not a season of discontent.  I have done the things I wanted to do and found the answers.  At least to that particular set of questions. Jill of not all but some trades and master of a few. I did not sell out myself or my morals.  I accomplished a great deal of things I never knew I could-or would. I helped people along the way-cut a different path-held out for true love and became a mom.  There are some things I did not do so well-I was a late bloomer.  It took me a while-to pack it all in and make it count. There were lots of disappointments and unexpected surprises. There are some things that still gnaw at my quest for a better self-a better life-but the sum total of my now is not so bad.  My knowing comes from years of not knowing-but working it all out anyway.  Good or bad.  And yet, I can’t look at my mother anymore without crying.  I can’t hear her cough.  I can’t tolerate the smoke.  As the daughter she raised, I am working(still) on my forgiveness, my ability to relax and just be, refining my patience and allowing things to unfold as they will. Whether I like it or not.

I am at the place of I don’t know-right around the corner from giant question mark. My season of pulling in and tending to those things that matter most-and redefining the other things I thought, at one time, mattered more.  I am at the corner of stillness and uncomfortable-but rounding the bend to the here and now.