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The Gifts that Keep Giving

Macramé and mother's love.

By Alyssa BudinockPublished 3 years ago 8 min read
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You are a living, breathing miracle. When you were conceived, that one sperm out of millions of eligible bachelors chose your mom’s egg. You became a cell. Then that cell divided, and you became two cells. Then four. Then eight. And so on. As the cells divided exponentially, they formed your tissues and organs, and then you.

There are tremendous gifts that come with being “chosen” to live a human life. There's also a curse: from the moment we are born, we are guaranteed to lose, and to be met with change we wouldn’t choose. Change that is hard to accept. Unjustly delegated. Impossible to understand.

As luck would have it, I was “chosen” twice. My biological mom gave me up for adoption at birth, and out of hundreds of thousands of families struggling to conceive children of their own, I was chosen by one of the best...

Growing up I lived an adorable small town life: all the love you could hope for, accompanied by some loud yelling and lots of hysterical laughter. There was never a whole lot of excitement happening in town, so we created our own. My favorite memories are of Mom "misbehaving" in public places - grocery stores, the laundromat, thrift shops - until we were all peeing our pants from laughter. To this day I’ve never met anyone who laughs with more vitality and soul than my mom did. She lived to make my sister and I roll around on the floor in stitches. It happened to be one of her greatest gifts.

We hovered over the dining room table one evening, watching mom slice through the wrapping paper in one motion with her scissors, meticulously folding in the ends of the wrapping paper, smoothing tape onto the corners. She picked up the parcel, inspecting it as she flipped it around in her hands, and handed it to my sister.

“Here ya go, Santa. Go put this under the tree.”

“You didn’t have to get us anything, you know.” I said.

She looked at me concernedly, ignoring my remark, “What happened to your macramé? Why’d you take it all apart?”

“I just didn’t like the way it looked.” I said.

She clicked her tongue. A canny smile crossed her lips, “You are just like your father. ‘The Perfectionist’”

“Oh really?” I replied. “I’M not the one folding the edges of the wrapping paper perfectly so the pattern lines up. It’s just gonna be ripped open anyway!”

“Oh...shut up and pass me the ‘tish pape’, would ya?”

It was a Deck-the-Halls kind of Christmas, the way we all would rather remember it. Cinnamon apple smell with a hint of wax steeped through the house. Dad’s good morning aftershave hugs, his thick wool socks and emerald green turtleneck still steamy from the shower. Mom in the dining room, wrapping gifts for the family and everyone else’s children. My sister baking sugar cookies with our giant lab Toby underfoot, supervising. And me on the living room floor, wreathed with yards and yards of tangled cotton rope, tying hundreds of little knots.

“That is gorgeous”, mom would say as she passed through the living room with armfuls of boxes.

“I know!”, I would reply eagerly, imitating confidence.

We were all unaware that in one of those ordinary moments, somewhere inside my mom’s chest, a cell had divided. It became two cells, then four, then eight, and grew exponentially. Scientists and researchers would call it an anomaly - a medical miracle. The doctor called it cancer.

A year later after a night out, I wandered the streets of Rochester. It was an icy mid-December night - the spicy-cold kind of night that tickles the bones. I cleared some snow off the sidewalk with my boot and sat down against a brick wall. A stranger in rags approached.

“You look like your best friend just died”, he said. He had kind eyes.

I shrugged. The uproarious bar scene echoed from around the corner. He sat down next to me.

“I’m a veteran. Afghanistan. I got nerve damage in my arm. Can’t use my right hand so I can't find no work. So I drink”.

“My mom is dying of cancer.”, I told him. "No one has actually said it out loud yet. But I think she might be."

We shivered. I cried.

I've come to realize that "acceptance" is not what most people think it is. It’s not the “final stage” of grief, or the magical moment when we’ve made peace with what happened, or the moment everything is “alright” again. Those are lovely fantasies. Acceptance, in truth, is actually where grief begins. It's when we begin to see things how they really are, rather than how we'd like them to be. We might not like it, or understand it, or know what to do about it...but we see it, and sense it. We can feel it.

The next morning I sat alone on my apartment floor, tying knots.

That is gorgeous, I imagined my mom saying.

“I know...”, I replied.

I had a sudden impulse to grab my phone. I called my mom's cell phone. My aunt answered instead.

“Hi sweetheart. Your mom is just seeing the doctor, she’ll call you in a bit”.

Seemed strange, for a Sunday. I hung up and called my sister.

“I think you better come home”, she said.

I moved home indefinitely to help make arrangements for hospice care. Dad shoveled the steps so that the medical staff could bring in the bed and the oxygen through the front door, while my sister and I moved the Christmas tree out of the way. Mom was conscious and upright, for a few days at least. She would only eat orange sherbet ice cream - and she hated orange for decades. “Too many Screwdrivers” one wild night in her 20s, we were always told. As the week passed her speech slurred and her body weakened. She stopped eating. She laid in bed.

My aunt and I cleaned out the fridge one morning while a nurse was in my mom’s room. We heard my mom yelling.

"Yikes...I'll go see..."

The Law and Order SVU intro came on just as I walked into the bedroom. Mom screamed again. The nurse turned to me with her hands up, her eyes like headlights. She clutched a pair of underwear in her hand - a white flag of surrender.

“I’m sorry Miss, I didn’t hurt her or anything, I didn't touch her. She won’t let me!” she said, breathlessly.

“It's okay, she's just...being stubborn. Mom, the nurse is here to help clean you up a bit. Can you let her wash you?”

She mumbled a strong and clear “NO.”

“Mom - we have to get you cleaned up, you’ll be so much more comfortable.” I took a step closer.

Her arm shot out to the side, her frail fingers wrapped around the bed railing. Her eyes narrowed. "Don't you dare", they said.

“Mom...what if I told you, you don’t have a choice?” I said, only half joking.

Underneath the mumbling I heard her, in all her sass, with crystal clarity.

“I’d tell you to kiss my a**”.

“Did she just say what I think she said?” the nurse asked.

"Yep...you heard it" I snorted.

"Well now I think...she was saying much worse than that when I was trying to change her..."

We gave up trying to move her. She had gotten her way. And she made me laugh, one last time. Her final gift. It wasn't wrapped to perfection or tied in a bow, but it brings a smile to my face whenever I tell the story. I guess it's a gift that keeps on giving.

On December 22, 2017, my sister, my partner and I were in the dining room wrapping presents. Dad was checking on mom.

“You’re really good at that. Better than I would be. I would just throw some paper at it and try to use one piece of tape” my partner said.

“I know, Mom taught me.” I smiled with pride as I snipped through some tish pape.

Moments later, a guttural wail from the bedroom cut through the Christmas music. It was my dad. Mom had just taken her last breath.

It’s been almost three and a half years since my mom’s death. I’ve come to know this to be true: We create our own happiness by opening to life - all parts of life.

Your life is a quantum rarity and a gift.

Grief and Joy are intimately connected, woven together in one big chaotic tapestry of life. One cannot exist without the other. They make art, art, and love, love, and all the loss and painfully sacred change we didn’t choose, worth embracing. On the other side of heartache is the deep in your bones kind of gratitude. Happiness that brings you to tears. Joy that reverberates in every cell. Contagious laughter that cuts through even the darkest moments.

Today as I write this, I’ve just finished working on my favorite tapestry, and my husband and I are hoping to create a little miracle of our own. Grief will forever be wildly woven into our story, the stories of our children, and our children’s children. And joy, happiness, love, and laughter are all things we’ll continue to create together...as we savor this gift of life.

humanity
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About the Creator

Alyssa Budinock

Emotional Resilience Coach by day, Fiber Artist by night. Alyssa curates and facilitates feminine leadership programs for rising changemakers who care with their whole hearts and want to embody the change they wish to see.

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