Her Ready Hands

– from A Cup of Comfort For Mothers

Brennan cried out from his crib and I hurried to get him before he woke Liddy. He dropped his head on my shoulder and threaded his fingers through my curls. He was still a baby himself, not even two, but I seldom held him like that anymore with three-month-old Liddy so often needing me.

Liddy was born with complications—swollen kidneys, an elevated white blood cell count because we had conflicting blood types, a heart murmur caused by a congenital heart defect, and a dimple in her spine that could signal more serious problems. Most of these issues simply required monitoring to ensure they resolved themselves. But Liddy also had severe reflux, a digestive disorder that kept her chronically underweight and vulnerable to breathing problems. I rarely left her, and then only with my husband John or with my mother, when she came in town to help. We had just moved to a new neighborhood and had no family close by, but my mother came often. She understood, as well as anyone, Liddy’s and Brennan’s needs—and mine.

With Brennan still on my shoulder, I heard Liddy chirp from my bedroom. I peered down the hallway to where my mother sat in the living room.

“Mom, can you get Liddy?”

She hopped up from her chair and I stepped back into Brennan’s room to hold him a minute longer.

Suddenly a heavy thud shook the floor. Brennan jerked upright in my arms.

“Hey,” I smiled, wanting to reassure him. “What the heck was that?”

I carried him to my bedroom and found Liddy alone, asleep in her bassinet. I walked through the empty kitchen, the dining room, the living room. Confused, I turned in a circle. My mother had disappeared. I walked back into my bedroom. My mother was down on the floor, still. Lying with her back to me, she wore blue jeans and her favorite denim shirt—the one she left hanging in my closet between visits, a small thing that marked her intention to return soon. I could see the white-blonde bob of her hair, but her face was somehow hidden by the comforter draping from my bed.

“Mom?”

She didn’t move. I set Brennan down.

“Mom?”

Silence. Stillness.

In a sudden rush of adrenaline, I moved to get the phone and dialed 9-1-1, ran back to the bedroom, dropped to the floor, and pressed my hand to Mom’s shoulder.

“My mother has fallen unconscious,” I told the 9-1-1 dispatcher. Those were the words that came to mind, strangely precise: My mother had fallen, unconscious.

But a few seconds later, my mother opened her eyes, and I wanted to cry out in relief.

“Mom, you passed out,” I said, and told the dispatcher that she was conscious again.

My mother sat up, startlingly alert. She shook her head. “I didn’t pass out.”

“You did,” I said. “I heard you fall.”

The dispatcher asked questions: “Is she breathing and speaking normally? Is she disoriented?”

“All fall?” Brennan asked, his language plucked from endless rounds of Ring-Around-the-Rosie.

“Yes, Grandma Mary fell. But she’s okay.”

“Karen,” my mother said, her tone reducing me to the role of recalcitrant teenager. “I did not pass out.”

I spoke into the phone. “She seems fine now. But she was unconscious. I heard her fall.”

I looked apologetically at my mother, who sat looking back at me as though I had lost my mind, leading me to wonder if I had, if perhaps she had simply lain down for a rest and I had misinterpreted, over-reacted in the most dramatic possible way. The dispatcher said she would send an ambulance anyway.

“I just can’t believe I passed out,” my mother said. She told me she’d gone to my bedroom and seen Liddy settling back into sleep, so she’d sat down on my ottoman for a minute to watch her.

“You’re on the floor,” I said.

She couldn’t argue with that. She sighed and, despite my protests, slowly got to her feet. Brennan and I followed her into the dining room. I gave her a glass of water, which she calmly set down on the end table and ignored. I called John, who said he would take the train right home.

“That better not be sirens,” my mother when we heard the approaching ambulance.

I sat Brennan in front of the TV and stuck in a Barney video. I opened the door and watched the EMTs get out of the truck. They moved slowly, and one went back into the ambulance for something he seemed to have forgotten; the word “bumbling” came to mind.

“You’re going to love these guys,” I laughed to my mother to ease the tension.

But they came in with an air of competence and I felt relief. It had been right to call. They would check her out and tell us she was fine. Jay was slight, handsome, and he spoke in a warm voice. Doug was heavyset and efficient and seemed to be in charge. They worked in concert, Doug setting up equipment on the kitchen table while Jay asked my mother questions. They stayed within arm’s reach of her.

She was turning gray, fading again. She murmured that she felt sick just as Liddy began crying from the bedroom.

I ran to get Liddy and flew back to see Jay and Doug lowering my semi-conscious mother to the kitchen floor. Jay pulled open her shirt and cut through her tank top to place monitors on her naked chest.

After placing Liddy in her infant seat on the floor, I grabbed a list of phone numbers off the refrigerator. Most were friends from our old neighborhood. I dialed Lucy, the one new neighbor who had visited our house. I tried to filter out Liddy’s cries, the grating voices on the television, and the harsh static of the radio, and instead focus on the EMTs words and Lucy’s voice on the phone, which turned out to be her answering machine.

Then Liddy’s cries became screams, and I looked up to see that her seat had tipped over and spilled her onto the floor. I picked her up and held her to me. “I’m here,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

I looked at the EMTs tending to my mother, understanding that they would need to take her, certain only that I needed to go, too. John wasn’t there, and the one other person I could trust with Liddy—the person I’d come to rely on more now than even, it seemed, when I was a child myself—was being lifted onto a stretcher.

I asked Doug if I could leave Liddy behind while I ran to get a neighbor. Then I pulled Brennan’s puffy yellow jacket around him and told him we were going to run to Lucy’s house to see if she was home. No one answered the door. I frantically scanned the houses up and down the street. The sage-colored house on the corner was lit warmly from within. John had mentioned them: a nice couple with two kids. I pulled Brennan close and ran up their steps. A woman opened the door and looked past me to see the flashing lights of the ambulance and the fire rescue truck pulling in behind it. The woman, Jill, reached for Brennan before I said a word.

“There’s the baby, too, at the house,” I said. “Can you come with us?”

When we reached the front steps, my upstairs neighbor, Alison, was waiting at my door. Inside, my mother still lay on the kitchen floor. Jill took Brennan from my arms, and Alison lifted a crying Liddy from her infant seat.

Several large men crowded the small space between my mother and me. “I’m right here, Mom,” I called.

She turned her head to look at me. She appeared completely at ease. “Where is Brennan?” she asked.

I told her that he was fine, that he was watching a video.

The men arranged my mother on the stretcher. They examined the narrow doorways and wondered whether they could make the turns. They opened a closet door for extra room. They lifted her. And then I was grabbing my wallet, my keys, my mother’s small suede purse, and calling out goodbye to Brennan and Liddy—Liddy, who never left my sight. And promising, praying, that John would be home soon.

Outside, in the quiet red glare of the ambulance lights, where my mother had already, again, disappeared, I stopped and caught a sob in my throat. Then Doug reached an arm out to me and guided me up into the high passenger’s seat of the ambulance and, in as kind a gesture as I’ve known, reached over me to pull the seatbelt across my lap and buckle me in.

At the hospital, I climbed out of the ambulance into the dark evening to see my mother being whisked through the emergency room’s double doors on the stretcher. I followed inside, where the over-bright ER was filled with people, noise and activity. I talked with an attendant and provided basic information about my mother: name, address, date of birth. When he asked about her insurance, I looked into her small suede purse, and the sight of her few, neatly ordered things made me ache for her. Afterward, I stood and leaned against a wall in the packed waiting room, alone among strangers, waiting.

My mother opened her eyes when I walked into the tiny curtained examination room, but she barely moved. She whispered that she was nauseous.  But after a nurse gave her a pill, she gradually began to seem herself again.

“Everyone likes my socks,” she smiled, wiggling her toes in the socks decorated with black cats that I had given her.

A cardiologist came in and said my mother was stable, but that they would need to admit her to run some tests. After getting settled into a room and calling her husband, my mother told me to go home to my kids.

I called a taxi and walked outside into the crisp night air. I caught my breath, held it, and then gave in to tears. I dialed my sister.

“Everything’s fine,” I told her. “Everything’s okay. I just can’t stop crying.”

For three days the doctors tested and monitored my mother. I drove to the hospital between Liddy’s feedings, and John visited, too, bringing her magazines and fresh bread, olives and cheese. He found her eyeglasses on my bedroom floor. But we never learned for certain what had caused the fainting episodes. The doctors speculated about a virus, dehydration, and a newly diagnosed heart murmur, a tiny hole in her heart, just like Liddy’s.

“I can’t be alone with my grandchildren until I know why this happened,” my mother said when she came home to us. She looked at Liddy. “I won’t hold her.”

“Maybe when you’re sitting down,” I said.

But I knew right away that I had said the wrong thing. For all of our sakes, I needed to replace the scary images in my head with the reality I was so fortunate to be living—a mother who was healthy and strong and here beside me as I learned to be a mother, too.

“Take her,” I said, holding Liddy out.

My mother moved toward a chair but I stopped her.

“Just take her,” I said.

She hesitated. Then she took Liddy into her arms. She touched her cheek to Liddy’s forehead, and I turned and left them there.