Stuck on the Slip Up
Walking to the coffee shop this afternoon, I slipped on a thin patch of ice covering the sidewalk. I felt my heart jump up to my throat before plummeting down to my stomach in a matter of moments. I didn’t fall, though. I shot my arms out to either side of me and waved them, catching my balance. I’d been walking so fast, worried I won’t get as much time in front of this laptop before my break is over. I had no idea what I wanted to write about until I slipped and almost fell.
I thought of my mom, and how she broke something in her back (her spine, maybe?) after falling off the top of our family van. I thought about how her body must have felt inside before her bones hammered into the pavement. I wonder how she braced herself, or if she could. When I watched her fall all those years ago, I didn’t see her hit the ground. I stood on the sidewalk that led up to the house we lived in at the time and watched her on the van’s roof struggling to unpack a crib affixed to the top. I watched her stand up quickly and immediately fall back. I didn’t see her arms flail to her sides, trying to catch her balance. Her body vanished behind the van, as she fell away from me, not towards. Her life changed in a matter of moments.
I don’t think about what would have happened had she’d not fallen, but I want to explore that in the days to come. When her accident happened (this is the first of a few, my mother has had some shit things happen to her) my mind recalls life being normal. I think she had a job. My siblings and I already had a babysitter who watched us after school during the week which tells me there had to be some kind of stability for my mom to afford a sitter.
It’s during this time that the memory gets fuzzy and blurred. We lived with the babysitter for some time, and when I think about it sequentially, it makes sense. Someone needed to look after my siblings and me while my mom was recovering. I’m not sure that she ever did, though. Her physical wounds healed poorly, and so did the emotional ones that she refused to talk about.