Mom Complex

I hold Grams’ hand, watch her eyes flit about, and see the anxiety that lives in the cracks on her face because she’s a grandma, and so a natural worrier, until the nurse comes in; says it’s time; shoos us out.

My mom and I regroup in the hallway. “It’s a miracle Ryan came home when he did,” she says. It was certainly a positive fluke, I think, that the neighbor kid’s an emergency medical technician; that he was pulling in when he got the beep; that he could run right over and revive Grams, yada-yada-yada, but not a miracle! But, I say yeah-yeah-yeah anyway since now’s obviously not the time to tell my mom—again!—that I don’t believe in her benevolent, fatherly puppet master who protectively looks down upon his children and lets them suffer, for example, sudden-death heart attacks but also fixes them via conveniently-placed, neighbor-boy EMTs, according to some inexplicable grand plan.

“God is good,” says my mom.

“OK, Ma,” I say with mild impatience. “Well, anyway, she’s OK now and...”

“Have faith,” she interrupts me.

“...in good hands,” I finish.

“Yes, she is,” my mom says, and, under her breath, she adds: “Keep the faith.”

“Ma, what are you doing?!”

“Shhh—your grandma is going to be—keep the faith—just fine,” she blurts, and I begin to think she’s really starting to lose it.

“Uhh, O... K...”

“Now that she’s with—keep the faith—these good doctors.” Then I’m sure of it. Sure, that, not unlike my grandma’s face, frozen in permanent worry from, well, too much worry, my mom’s mind has become God-addled from too much... belief.

I then hear movement behind me and turn to see a young man, perhaps younger than me, hunched over in his wheelchair, abjectly weeping. I hadn’t heard him come up behind me, though, I can see that, from her vantage point, my mom would have seen it all: would have seen him rolling up; seen him realizing the gravity of the matter; seen him losing all hope; seen him putting his head into his hands; seen him crying like a child who’s lost his mom in the supermarket and who is, quite possibly, all alone in the cosmos too.

And I understand.

“We should go to the waiting room,” my mom says and I agree with her, this time sans the qualitative inner feedback.

As we walk to the elevators, I hope that the young man in the wheelchair heard in the ether my mom’s message, tailor-made for him; and that he does believe in the existence of a benevolent puppet master who protectively looks down upon him; and maybe even one who lets him suffer as he does now, but who will also fix him.