Must get ready for another day at the hospital with Mom. I'm anxious to see if her nutrition via veins is working. If so, next is the tube into the small intestine, and if the food absorbs Mom has a chance to begin physical and speech rehabilitation so that she can return to her home at the assisted living center and NOT a nursing home. Send power to her, please.

I know we are all on our own paths, unique and pertinent to our contracts way before we were born from our mothers. I know this and it is all that keeps me sane when I think of my mother's options since her most recent stroke. She has been disabled for 30 years. When my sister remarked about the three decades, I was shocked. Had never thought of it that way. Seventeen years of helping her dress, cooking for her, driving for her, and then 13 years worrying over her when I moved to New York and her 2,000 miles away, back home in Texas with my sister and brother, home health, and yet never seeming like we could get her squared away and safe.

Now she has to start all over again in learning to walk and to swallow food. She is 80 and her path exhausts me, but it is her path, and if she wants to continue walking it, I must find strength to reach my own peaceful place on which my path understands that.

My mother and I have never gotten along even though as my younger daughter told me a few nights ago, "Mom, you always tried!"

Thank goodness for daughters.

And mothers.

Two days ago, flat on her back, she told me, "You have become so dynamic."

I looked at her. I knew to hold on to that moment and to relish it.

"Thank you, Mom," I said.

Yesterday morning I entered her hospital room and discovered the "Pic" line had been placed into her central vein already, not later in the day as I was told. "I wasn't afraid," she said to me, as I sat in a chair beside her. "I did what you said, Sheela. I told fear to go and sit in the corner."

Fifty-four years of squabbling flew into the sky. I stared at my mother. "And did it listen?" I asked, my voice, cracking.

"It did," she said. "I am not afraid."

Whatever happens to my mother, whether she regains her strength and can orally eat and return to her home, or if she decides to fly on to the Great Wide Open, or if she is forced into a nursing home, I know she is not afraid, not fearful, no longer thinking she has done something wrong and punishment awaiting her.

"I love you, Nancy," I've gotten her to say once a day since the week I've been home.
"I guess I never really liked myself," she said days ago, hungry, weak, and asking God to take her.

I love you, Nancy.