I think only twice have I written two entries in one day. But I am here, waiting, although I am fairly certain of today’s outcome. You don’t live as long as I do (37 years, last I counted) and not develop a well-honed sense of intuition and observation. I am happy either way, and even when I have moments of always the bridesmaid, never the bride, I realize that I never really wanted to be married in that legal sort of way in the first place. Besides, what would I do with all that leftover taffeta?
Mostly, however, I am waiting for news a little further down the road. Waiting to see how my tests have turned out. Waiting harder to know whether my son’s egg-sized brain tumour, removed on Monday after surgery, is malignant or benign. Waiting to see if, by writing the word malignant, I can somehow effect those outcomes – the kind that intuition cannot appease.
He was an obstinate child, resisting all attempts toward, “No, Pablo, don’t touch that. No, Pabby, you can’t have candy before supper. Pablo, that belongs to your sister. Please give it back. Pablo, you have to get up for school – home room counts. Pablo, why don’t you ever call me back?” But obstinacy can save lives.
He was also, and still is no doubt, challenging, lively, funny, determined, insistent, persuasive, elusive, enormously intelligent, sentimental (I am surprised he didn’t ask the surgeon to preserve the tumour in a jar), and easily hurt...like his mother, occasionally imagining slights when none were intended, and making some up when he felt like getting back at a world that always left him feeling a little bit short of first.
He has been gone from me and from us for many years now, wandering off to plant his own feet in a yard of his own making. But his absence doesn’t make my worry or my love for him or even my fear or impatience any slighter, and I hope that someday, when he is completely well again, he will come back my way – to this yard of my own making, here with Mary – his two lovely children in tow, chattering away a mile a minute and, as he did for more than twenty-five years (how is that possible when I am only 37?), saying things like, “Mum, what do you think?” and “Come on, Mum. Let’s have some fun!”
I learned a certain kind of patience when I was a child, wondering when my mother would come back. I waited five years almost to the day, until one late summer afternoon there she was, all sadness and smiles, standing in the doorway of my father’s home. I wasn’t to have or to know her for more than a handful of years, but oh, what a blessing that I had her again at all.
So here’s to anxious, hopeful waiting…waiting for tumours to be benign; waiting for pain to go away and scars to heal; waiting for the happy sounds of my son’s voice telling me that, finally, everything is fine.
