Unearthing by Kyo Maclear

Author:Kyo Maclear [Maclear, Kyo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

SEPTEMBER 9

It had been three months since I discovered that a Jewish racecar driver was my father. To receive a new father so deep into life is a bit like being born again. So, I was a baby. But in caring for my mother, I was also tasked with being very adult. So, I was both very young and very old—an ancient infant. At the hospital I could hear the receptionist opening and closing drawers. Somewhere a hammer was hammering. A rolling chair creaked beneath a long metal desk. A cleaner went back and forth with a spritz bottle. Footsteps receded, a door closed, a laugh behind the door.

Today, the volunteer circling with the juice and cookie trolley was an Asian woman, very tender with my mum, almost saintly. She offered her a sparkly beanie to glamorize her head. She said to me, “There was a time when we were small and our mothers were large and strong. Now…” She drew a huge moon in the air with her arms. “Full circle of caregiving.”

Few people are as willing to engage with strangers as my mother. If friendship is a marathon, she prefers sprints of infatuation. Today, she left me and sidled up to a woman of her age seated alone in a corner, bald and barefaced with the exception of a black winged line drawn dramatically on each eyelid. Soon the woman was enraptured and they were laughing and exchanging banter with a younger man who moments earlier was sullenly thumbing the crucifix around his neck. “What’s so funny?” I asked with a smile. They giggled more.

“Oh wow, your mother!” said the woman, a few minutes later. “What a marvelous girl!”

Sometimes I eavesdropped on her waiting room conversations. No one seemed to mind her opening gambit: “What’s your problem?”

Pancreatic cancer.

Leukemia.

Brain cancer.

The women she approached seemed mostly relieved to have someone interested in them or their states, eager to shake any private sense of illness away from their skin. They talked of “back home” and shared tips on how to treat skin scarred and blistered by radiation. My mother handed out Kleenexes from her purse. She was, in these brief moments, a vivacious listener and natural consoler, nodding thoughtfully. Her usual combativeness dissolved into a shy sense of reciprocity. She was a vigilante, eager to protect others. I could see she was worried about the women, worried for herself, worried about the whole waiting room.

The mother in my head, the one rebuffing her offspring’s intimate questions, was different from the open and ardent person offering her seatmates cinnamon chewing gum and bottomless care.

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