I would choose to be your mother

About three weeks before my mother passed away, I was spending time with her in the hospital room at Brigham and Women’s in Boston, Mass. She had just been deemed “well enough” to be moved out of the Cardiac ICU and into a room in the step-down wing on the same floor. She certainly was not well at all. In fact, as she waited for a heart transplant, she was as sick as a person could possibly be. However, when you’re talking in terms of congestive heart failure and heart transplants, health is relative and you find yourself celebrating these very small victories despite the grave nature of the overall condition. Quite simply, small victories are often all you have to celebrate.

I was alone with my mother that day and was scheduled to fly back home soon. Once settled in the new room, we flipped on the television. I’m not sure if we were eager to watch a show since the ICU room that my mother had been in for a few weeks did not have a tv - I guess they figure if you find yourself in the Cardiac ICU that television is not a priority for you - or if we just craved a little background noise and normalcy in a world of invasive procedures, IV drips and constant monitoring by doctors and nurses. Either way, Regis and Kelly was on. We were only half watching until Kelly began telling a story that caught our attention. I only remember the ending of the story, which is fine because that’s the only part that truly matters to me. It was about a woman who was addressing her son publicly and said something to the effect of: “If I could choose to be one thing in this world, I would choose to be your mother.”

Those words hung in the sterile air of that hospital room and even though the program continued, time had stopped in our little corner of the world. Our grip on each others’ hands tightened slightly. We had both heard the same thing. At that moment, I understood my mother as only a mother can. In that moment, we connected not only as mother and child, but also as one mother to another. That sentiment, that if you could go back over your entire life and choose just one experience, you would choose to experience yourself as a mother, is true for me and I knew it to be true for her as well. And perhaps the most important word of the whole beautiful phrase is the second to last – the word your. I wouldn’t just choose to be a mother. I would choose to be your mother. Because any mother understands with her heart that children are not accidentally yours, but they have been born to you because your souls have somehow been perfectly matched. Your children are already part of your family, even before conception. Their birth is simply the moment that they come into the world for you to lay eyes upon them. For you to hold and kiss and cuddle this tiny being that you feel you’ve known all along and yet are just meeting for the first time.

My family was never one to speak with much emotion, and for this reason I am grateful that the universe conspired for my mother and I to hear these words together. Although the words did not come directly from her, she said them to me in her heart. I understood her sentiment and the transcendent strength of her love for my sister and me. Even though I could truthfully repeat the same phrase for myself, in that moment my heart spoke to her, “And I would be your daughter.”