I could not hear what was going on the other end of the phone, but it was making her cry, and I was crying too.
When I was younger, I used to watch my mum get ready for work in the morning, tracing the line of her lashes with eyeliner, putting on blouses and heels. She said that she liked how it made her feel. I saw her as somebody who would always be there to protect me, who was capable of anything.
The phone call in question was one that she had been waiting on for a few weeks: the final diagnosis of her breast cancer.
The process of treatment was slow and hellish. After the treatment, all her hair thinned, and she wore false eyelashes some days and penciled in the gaps in her eyebrows. My mother, who would never take naps or sleep past eight in the morning, was suddenly so exhausted by being awake that she would sometimes stay in bed for the whole day. Actually after the surgery, she felt too painful and weak to lift a gallon of milk.
She once asked me if I was glad to be aware of her illness. I spent the majority of the year of her treatment worrying but I told my mother that I was glad to have had the privilege of worrying.
Before my 13th birthday, I'd always considered a birthday to have fun and the joy of becoming a year older. Seeing my mom for the first time after surgery was the end of that. That isn't to say that she had changed fundamentally; my mother was still beautiful and kind and incredibly strong, but the person that she was no longer tied to my ideas of her.
Growing up and beginning to see your parents as people are inseparable processes. That birthday was the turning point of a year that forced me to begin to see my mother as a person, someone whole and real.
