I can identify with this beautiful story “The Truth About Mothers and Daughters.” Even though my children are young, I see myself in them. My oldest, age 4, is always asking if I wore my hair a certain way when I was her age or played with a certain toy. She is eager to learn about me and do things I did. As a daughter, I too hope that someone will say to me that I am like my mother. I love her and respect her and am so proud to say, ‘She is my mom!’”

 Thank you Kate for posting this heartfelt comment and joining the conversation.

For the past six years, my daughters’ school has had a fundraiser with “class baskets.” Each class has a theme and parents are asked to donate new items to fill the baskets for a raffle at the school’s spring festival. Some baskets have items donated from $150 to $1500. But the raffle tickets for each basket are always a dollar.

Our family has donated many items over six years, and we have never won. Really, that shouldn’t matter, right? After all, this is to help the school. But I want something good to happen to us.

This past winter was extremely difficult. In the same week, my daughter and my father were hospitalized. It was devastating enough to have my dad admitted to the hospital because he is dying of cancer. It was also unexpected for me to have to take my daughter.

It began when my husband and I went out for dinner by ourselves — something that we rarely do — so we had a sitter come over to watch our eight- and eleven-year-old daughters. We didn’t expect to be gone long, and I felt guilty having a fun evening out while my dad is suffering.

When we returned home, our eight-year-old was sick and throwing up. It continued into the following day. The nausea didn’t concern me but the abdominal pain seemed unusual. Also, her coloring was exactly like my dad’s coloring now, as he gets closer to death each day. I knew she needed to be seen by a doctor.

Fortunately, I made the right decision to bring her to the hospital. After many tests, the doctors concluded my daughter had appendicitis and needed to have immediate surgery. We had no way of knowing whether it ruptured until surgery.

An entire team of doctors were called in at 1 a.m. for this emergency. After surgery, we learned her appendix had not ruptured, and my daughter would make a full recovery.

During all of this, every time my cell phone rang, I prayed it was not my mom delivering bad news about my dad. While my daughter has recovered, my father continues his fight.

So at the school’s spring festival, we bought raffle tickets for a chance to win a basket. As my daughters walked around looking at the baskets, I thought, “Can we be lucky today?”

They excitedly talked about how they wanted to win the pamper-yourself basket, which was loaded with spa gift certificates, scented soaps, lotions, hair products and decadent chocolates. I tried not to create false hope but I was thinking, “Our time was now.” Secretly, I was hoping to win something that would be fun for the family.

Forty class baskets were auctioned off and it took forever. There was so much commotion with talking and people walking by that I didn’t even notice what basket was being auctioned off until I heard my daughter’s name. I looked up to discover that we had finally won something!

We had won a tailgate basket filled with a cooler, a grocery store gift card, barbeque sauce and a football. Both my daughters had not wanted that basket and pouted on the ride home. But I drove home excited. Maybe our luck was turning.

But, since I turned forty, gravity has been on my mind more and more. It is no longer just the unseen force that holds me to this planet I love so dearly, it is also the force that has been working its magic on my body for the past forty years.

However, the pull of gravity on my body is not why I’ve been giving it more thought lately. It is because of my five-year-old that I have given gravity more attention than I ever have in my life.

She is a normal five-year-old, full of questions, constantly moving, experimenting and downright cute. Of course, she’s my child, so the cute comment can be mostly attributed to my personal beliefs.

Her birthday is in December, so she has not yet started school, and I still get to enjoy her company all day, every day. This is a good thing, for me. I get all the benefits of her imagination and the straightforward way her brain functions.

My attention was drawn to gravity on one particularly happy day. The sun was shining, the breeze was slight, and the kids were outside playing. That was until the five-year-old came in with a distraught look and clenched fists.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her, thinking she and her younger sister had been fighting.

“Mom,” she said, her expression serious. “I just hate gravity.”

“Why?” I was flabbergasted. Why would my child come to me with such a statement, and where the heck did she learn about gravity? I didn’t recall ever having any conversations about why apples fall from trees or why we don’t fly off into space.

She screwed up her face a little more to emphasize her displeasure with this thing called gravity. “Because!” She stomped her foot. “It won’t let me fly. See —” She ran around the room with her arms outstretched and, most certainly, did not take flight.

Two years before I had lost my job. I had been relying on the kindness of my father and now I had other means.

Shopping took over an hour. I needed every staple, every . . . well, everything. After I loaded the car, my back was so painful. I looked like a question mark, but my heart was light for the first time in an eternity.

I snapped my seat belt, turned the key in the ignition and — nothing. Tried again. Not even a click.

I popped the hood, hoping for loose battery cables. Nope. All was tight and tidy.

A wonderful woman offered me a jump, and an older man helped us get that going. When I turned the key again, my car responded with dreadful silence.

By this time an elderly couple, who had parked near me, shopped and come out, approached me with an offer to help. I was distraught and I suppose it showed.

They asked, “Well, what will you do?”

Revealing some of my troubles, I shared that I would have to phone my father and ask for more money. The elderly couple insisted in taking me and my groceries home. Leaving the car there distressed me even more because the driver’s side window didn’t work and had to be left open a crack.

After I got home and unloaded the groceries, I made the horrible, embarrassing phone calls asking for help.

The next day my son took me to get a battery. We arrived at the store, and I opened the car door, leaned inside the car and pulled the lever to pop open the hood. There on the driver’s seat was a small white envelope. A sun wearing sunglasses was drawn on it.

I picked it up and turned it over. On the back was a doodle of a daisy and three little words that were huge to me “for a battery.” Inside were five twenty-dollar bills. I don’t know who left it but I will never forget it.

Many times I have tried to pay it forward. When things are not going well and I am frustrated with the world, I only have to picture that symbol, the best that should dwell in all of us: a little smiling sun wearing shades.

The women at work and the courtesy clerk at the local Safeway tell you the hair looks great and the jeans fit fine, but you secretly know you’re carrying a spare tire. Your loving husband reports you look better than neighborhood women that are ten years younger, but you know he’s telling a little white lie.

Aging sucks, especially when your upper arms are soft as a goose feather pillow and your butt no longer sits high and proud. What is left of your butt is flat and gravity pulls it closer to the ground every day. No matter what face cream you buy, it does not work magic on crow’s feet. It fails to lift the brows or smooth the lines on either side of your smile. And no white strips make your teeth shine like the young actresses on Entertainment Tonight. Oh, that’s right. I’m not young.

What I am is full of spirit, sass and spite. What I am is full of hope, happiness and hate. What I am is tough, terrific and tired. I try to keep in balance. I take my vitamins every morning before coffee, and I pray before I drink that coffee. I stop to smell the flowers and eat a strawberry right out of the garden.

I may not be of tight body and smooth face. I may not be 5’8″ and 118 pounds anymore. I may not be super sexy to men in their 40s and 50s but sometimes I catch an old cowboy in his 60s giving me the eye — and it isn’t my husband.

It’s true I have lived through the 60s, and I survived the 70s living on Haight Avenue, the epicenter of the hippy culture. I danced through the 80s listening to Madonna. In the 90s I decided to marry again and the last twenty-three years, I have sometimes wondered why I made that decision.

I do all right alone. I do all right with a partner. And no matter where I live and who shares that space with me, I will always be the woman I grew to be.

In any other town, the people would take advantage of the relative quiet to do some serious shopping or eating  — avoid the crowds. Here, people wait in parked cars, stare at notices on the community bulletin board and wave halfheartedly at friends who miss the greeting because they’ve noticed a fascinating cloud pattern in the sky. You lean back in your chair to watch the geese formation fly overhead and for once the phone stops ringing and the wash cycle seems to linger for another thirty minutes or so. Radios are tuned to the morning sports talk show from nearby Sacramento and conversations stop as you drift off to imagine the latest NBA trade is life-changing.

I went into the breakfast-only café and found a table near the window. The cook glanced up from behind the high counter, his eyes focusing above my head to a truck passing on the main street. He seemed indifferent to my presence and my potential order.

The waitress didn’t see me sit down, busy as she was with the five-page newspaper in her hand. The sun peeked weakly through the blinds and I just want coffee. I couldn’t eat if I tried. I’m visiting Runny River today to see a real estate agent. But I’ve been hanging out here almost my entire life. Mostly summers, when I went to a summer camp nearby and when worked at the camp years later. Afterwards I spent longer and longer stretches in the Runny River area backpacking, camping. Then I brought my husband and kids along for summer vacations hiking the trails or swimming in the river.

Today, I am buying a piece of property here. I am going solo. My husband thinks I am at a nursing conference. I have been saving my money for five years to do this, and we have talked about doing this for thirty-five years. I will be surprising my husband and children. I am beyond ecstatic and hardly slept last night. It will be ten acres of rural property, and I will call it The Big Cheese because the idea of owning land sounds very grand to me.

I won’t own livestock but I will have my own branding symbol: a big piece of cheese. It’s been a subject of various doodles over the years on cocktail napkins, envelopes and other paper scraps. The symbol will be carved into a piece of wood that will hang over the log gate, which I will build at the foot of the dirt road leading to The Big Cheese. Very original. Don’t steal it.

I will also name the dirt road after my son and the meadow after my daughter. Hand-carved wooden signs again. I will have to learn some basic woodworking. Christmas photos this year will be fantastic.

As a place I’d live in a heartbeat, Runny River has been in my daydreams for years. It survived my teens when I thought I wanted to be an actress and moved for a year to New York. It lasted through my early twenties when I was struggling to find a career and stay in school long enough to get a degree. It flourished when my kids were little and still loved camping with us. It maintained a steady pull even after my children grew up and preferred going to Runny River with their own friends. I can say that very rarely does a day pass that I don’t think about Runny River.

I wonder if, after I buy this property, Runny River will still be the top five preferred places to live on my list. I am not sure. It will depend on how hard I am willing to work and labor. I will have to learn to lay a foundation for a cabin, drill a well, install electricity, live without the Internet for a while and dispense with the romantic notions of building a cabin.

Meanwhile, in two hours I’m signing the papers and picking up the “keys” to my rural property. After that, it’s running my truck heading out on the dirt for five miles until I see a collapsed barn. From there, I will proceed up another dirt road to the level spot in the aspen grove overlooking the valley.

Thank you Judy for this wise comment!

My father raised me when my parents separated and eventually divorced in the mid 1960s. It never really affected me because I was always daddy’s girl, and we did everything together. My father’s friends even called me his shadow. Back then, I believed it was more important for a girl to have a father than a mother; this was how I justified not having a mother around all the time.

When I grew up and married, my husband and I bought a small house, never expecting that my mother, recently widowed from her second husband, would become my neighbor. Now, I don’t mean that she lived on the same block or even in the same town, but nonetheless she was only five minutes by car, and on a nice day, twenty minutes on a bike or thirty minutes by foot. For someone who rarely saw her mother the first forty years of her life, Mom was now too close to not get to know. And that is what I did, I got to know my mother.

I discovered she loved to draw and she was pretty good. One day while visiting, I noticed a large pad of paper and a box of colored pencils. My older sister Margie was artistic and perhaps this trait came from Mom.

I also noticed that my mother never brought anything she hadn’t saved for first. If it was old and worn, she made it last until her bank book said she could afford it. She was an adequate cook but not outstanding, which was shocking because when she was married to my father, he had a weight problem, and I assumed it was because of my mother’s good cooking. In fact, she was a picky eater, preferring to stand and serve people instead of sitting with the family and eating dinner.

There were so many nuances to take in when I visited my mother. With time I tried to connect some of my personality traits to hers and find a link of commonality. I relished the stories she told about growing up in a large family and her twist on meeting my father and being a young bride and mother. I listened to her philosophy of life and motherhood — most of it, I couldn’t disagree.

After my mother passed, I have made a point never to drive by her house again. I wanted to preserve in my mind the space that we came to know each other.

I wanted to remember the fig tree in the backyard that she wrapped each winter; the azalea bushes that lined the front yard a deep mauve pink, each synchronized to bloom in early May; and the white dogwood tree, which I carted to her house one day in my little Toyota, destined to fill a space on her front lawn. We dug a deep hole together and wrestled with its girth to place it in the ground. Our hands were dirty and we broke a sweat together. This was the only thing we did together as mother and daughter.

I couldn’t bear to drive by her house and not see that tree. In my mind, it stands for the endurance of motherhood, and that it is never too late.

“Several of your neighbors came by during the night and asked me if I was OK,” my mother said.

“Oh, no,” I said.

“It was OK,” my mother said.

“No, that’s not OK,” I replied.

I sat down on the bottom step, refreshed after six hours of sleep. But the problem still remained: How was I going to get my mother upstairs?

Per my mother’s suggestion, we tried using a chair — easing it under her and then trying to tip it upright. I half-hoped a neighbor would come along, half-hoped not. We definitely needed help, but what would they think? I mean, this was my mother on the floor.

In the midst of my debating, Fran, my eighty-two-year-old neighbor came out of her apartment at the top of the stairs to retrieve her Sunday paper at the bottom of the stairs. Fran was a dear in her own way, but not dear enough that I wanted her to find my mother in a heap on the floor.

“Oh, good morning, Gail,” Fran brayed in her voice that always seems to be parodying Edith Bunker’s. “I just need to get my paper. . . Say, my temple closed down . . . We have to go over to California now. . .They sold the building to the school . . . You know, I tripped over my telephone cord and hurt my foot. Isn’t that terrible?”

I needed to keep her diverted. I schmoozed her for a few minutes, trying to block her view over the banister and I said, “Let me get your paper, Fran.”

“Yes, I was just going to come down to get my Sun-Times. I’ll give it to you when I’m through,” Fran offered.

“No. Let me bring it up to you. Really, it’s, it’s no trouble, Fran.”

I managed to get the paper without Fran meeting my mother that morning.

I called the paramedics — actually, the fire department — to get my mother upstairs to my apartment.

I greeted the firemen, “You brought a hook and ladder?”

“That’s an engine,” they informed me.

They carried Mom up the stairs and deposited her on the couch, where she stayed for the next four days. I went to work for the next three days and came home at various times. She virtually never moved.

On Monday, I called home to learn the power was off. After unsuccessfully trying to locate the landlord, I called the paramedics again to check on my mother. Not wanting the paramedics to break down the door, because my mother could not get off the couch, I decided that I needed to go home.

I notified my office and asked them to call my clients to cancel my meetings. “You’ll have to call them yourself,” the office manager informed me. “You’re here. We call clients only when you’re not here.”

Now I was the one who blew a fuse.

I arrived home, the power was still off, but fortunately not in the kitchen — no rotting meat to have to deal with.

Mom was still breathing. “I’m fine,” she said true to form every time I asked her how she was doing. Then the power came back on.

The next day I went back to work and tried to call Mom around 10 in the morning to check on her. She apparently picked up the phone but said nothing.

“Mom!” I implored. I could hear the TV in the background. So at least, the power was on.

Another call to the paramedics.

Before sending someone out, they tried to reach her and called me back. “Your mother is fine,” they told me. “She sounds perfectly coherent.”

I blew another fuse and called back my mother.

“Yes,” she replied after I asked if the paramedics had called. Her tone was as if I asked, “So why are your undies in a bungle?”

I stayed at work that day, and my mother continued her stay on my couch. So I called the Department of Human Services, spoke to a supervisor and related what was going on in my living room.

“You are endangering the health of your mother. She belongs in a hospital.”

Talk about hearing something that will snap you into action and get your mother off the couch! But how would I get my mother into the hospital?

As a community mental health professional, I knew well the drill when doing a psych admit. But I really didn’t want to go that route with my mother. Despite the tortuous conditions she was enduring and though — of course — she was still insisting she was fine, I nevertheless deemed her coherent and sane.

I needed something acute to have her admitted medically, and something to keep her there. Otherwise, she could end up in a nursing home. Then I called my cousin who is a nurse; she told me the buzzwords “acute and change.”

With this advice, I got my mother to a hospital ER by ambulance. She was admitted to the main hospital and received physical and occupational therapy.

My mother still had not seen the entirety of my one-bedroom apartment. Over a month later, she went back to her home in a neighboring state and had the help of a caretaker.

Later that week, I went back home. I missed my mom terribly.

I remember attending my twenty-year high school reunion and being (not surprisingly) the only pregnant person there. Several friends were new grandparents, and most had children who were married or college-age. I felt smugly that my life was only beginning while theirs was rapidly and predictably winding down. I had a sense of unwritten pages, while my friends were approaching their final chapters.

Now I see things from another perspective, the older parent with the younger daughter, and the contrast between us is a lot less amusing than it used to be. While 50 may be the new 40, and 40 the new 30, being middle aged is just as disconcerting as I had always imagined. Holding a demographic majority and being in the over-40 crowd will never equate with the vision of myself I still carry in my mind.

“Don’t you think my hair is beautiful?” my daughter asks, tossing her thick tresses over her shoulder with a practiced, casual flip. This is a frequent topic of conversation at our house, and I resist rolling my eyes before I respond.

“Sure,” I say with a noncommittal shrug, unwilling to throw gasoline on this particular fire. “I had great hair when I was your age too.”

“OK,” she says in that doubtful tone I dread creeping into her voice.

“I actually did,” I say, resenting her dismissive tone. Digging into an envelope I had recently unearthed, I brandish my graduation picture, circa 1973, showing me with waist length, obviously thick, dark hair. “See?”

Scrutinizing the black and white photo, she says, finally, “Well, your hair looks kind of frizzy.”

Taking the photo back, I say, “You know, it was a lot harder to control curly hair then than it is now.” I am thinking about, but not mentioning, my cousin and me ironing our hair with actual irons, and subjecting our scalps to the caustic effects of those early chemical straighteners. Still all things considered, I thought my hair looked pretty good.

“Whatever” that dismissive phrase that puts every parent’s teeth on edge.

What I am I trying to prove anyway? Of course I was her age once, but she’ll never really picture it any more than I could imagine my own mother being young. I want to say a thousand things, but wisely, for once, I say nothing.

I know the girl I used to be, and she still exists in that parallel universe of memory. All the hope and expectations I had then are reflected now in the eyes of my daughter, who sees me merely as Mom. I am somebody else’s girlfriend, confidante, wife, sister. Always destined to be half of the parental unit, I am someone my daughter will never know in any other context. Now it is her life that is rich with possibility, and it is my job to make sure she never loses sight of the person she envisions herself to be.

Still, I recall wistfully an incident from the past, with me driving along in my new, white Mustang. A sudden loud, scraping noise from the under carriage had me pulling to the side of a busy but remote stretch of roadway. Despite my ignorance of all things mechanical, I remember looking under the car, my long hair nearly sweeping the ground. In this distant era before cell phones, I was just beginning to weigh the merits of driving off despite the noise, when a car pulled in behind me.

Soon a second, then a third vehicle followed. Suddenly, I was surrounded by would-be Good Samaritans, each man vying to fix the problem at hand. Ruefully, I acknowledge to myself that if a similar scenario occurred today, my best hope for help would be my cell phone and an auto club membership.

Turning to my daughter, I say at last, “Men do love long hair, you know.”

“Well duh” is her reply. “I hate it when people stare at me though,” she adds.

“Yes, I didn’t like it either,” I say. I am thinking of the days when I walked blocks out of my way to avoid construction workers and their inevitable comments. Today, I could walk pass a similar work site with my hair on fire, and no one would even notice.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “The day will come when no one looks at you. You will be virtually invisible.”

She raises her eyebrows, but surprisingly, this comment elicits no response.

I know my daughter is many things besides young and pretty, and I want her to know that too. The truth is, she is vital, strong, opinionated, and thanks to a deliberately annoying older brother, never backs down from a confrontation. She’s a skilled and competitive athlete, a good student, a loyal friend, and a genuinely kind person.

I am thinking of a day the previous school year when she came home irate after confronting a well-known bully.

“So” she says, jumping right into the middle of the story. “This moron starts mocking Caleb because he stutters! As if that’s something he has any control over. What kind of person does that?”

Before I can comment, she continues. “I just asked him, what’s your problem anyway? Then, he gets right up in my face! And I say, listen, do I look like I’m worried here?”

Intrigued now, I ask the obvious question “Then what happened?” although, admittedly, I am picturing my 5’3” daughter stabbing her finger indignantly into the bulked-up chest of said moron.

“Get this,” she says. “Everybody starts agreeing with me and then he says, ‘You’re not that pretty you know,’ and walks away.”

I see the same triumphant look on her face that I saw the day in preschool she was the designated line-leader. Some things never change.

With a final flourish, she runs the brush through her hair, and minute blue sparks dance briefly around her head. I watch as my daughter walks out into the night, car keys dangling from her hand. The screen of her iPod glows in the darkness, and her fingers dance rapidly across it. Fireflies flicker around her, as if in response to her obvious force field, and even the stars seem to give an acknowledging wink.

She is light years away from the girl in the white Mustang, but briefly, I glimpse her, that other, younger me. This is the real truth about mothers and daughters, of course. A daughter allows you to see yourself reflected in her eyes, a gesture, or a toss of her hair. She is the culmination of all your dreams, and the embodiment of hers. I embrace the possibility that someday, long after I’m gone, someone will say, “You know, you remind me of your mother.”

“You’ll have to pay the full $7 fare to have dinner with me at the club,” she explained.

I handed her a book to read from our thoroughly filled bookshelf, appreciating our common love for literacy.

I had to smile at her smile. She wobbled to our living room couch and sat down. She lost her husband three years ago and joined to be a member of a seniors club to acquaint herself with other ladies her age.

My diva mother, Donna, unfolded a pair of reading glasses from her purse and began thumbing through the book written by Nora Ephron called I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.

I studied my mother’s face. I have twenty-five years to catch up to her age but my mother well remembers going through “the change.”

“It’s worse than wearing elephant pants and living through puberty in the ‘70s, Mom,” I said as I fanned my face in a hot spell.

My husband, John, looked at me and laughed. He set down my mother’s coffee cup on the living room table and said, “Donna, I’ll love your daughter forever but if this is menopause she’s experiencing, she’s turning into a real bee with an itch.”

Mom laughed, “Come play bingo-ten with Karen and I tonight, John. ”

John asked her what “ten” stood for.

She replied, “There are always at least ten middle-aged life changers in every bingo room I’ve sat in.”

After chatting with one another for a while, my mother stood up, holding on to her walker for support as I held her arm, guiding her to the front door. John declined to join us, so Mom and I left for the club five miles away, my always independent mother behind the steering wheel.

At the seniors club, several other daughters were with their mothers like I was. I wondered if I was the only middle-aged women there who missed the days of being carded at the stores in my thirties, thinking of how annoying it was to have to prove my age, when I was obviously an adult.

Was I the only fifty-five-year old woman repeating my teenage identity crisis? Did they, too, watch the movie ET and sob like a baby for the alien when he nearly died?

My own head full of hair looked nearly as gray as my mother’s hair. We sat and spread our bingo cards on the table, pulling our multi-colored markers out of our purses and waited to hear if our lucky numbers would be called.

“You’re still a young little girl to me,” a lovely mother-friend and mentor said, glancing into my anxious eyes, as she stabbed the numbers on her bingo cards with bright oranges, pinks and red.”

“G-17″ the aging bald man at the podium shouted out, shuffling from side-to-side.

“You aren’t Jack Nicholson and this isn’t As Good as It Gets, baby!” Mom laughed, reminding me of the delightful movie with Jack and Helen Hunt.

My mother dotted four more called numbers, towards the end of the game, then shouted like a high school cheerleader, “I won! I won! I won!”

She left the club $250 richer that night and, after she had left to go home, I decided she was right.

I said to John as we turned off the lights to sleep for the night. “Hot flashes, cold flashes or whatever, Mom is right. We’ve got to make lemon aid out of lemons and turn our middle aging into the best years of our life.”

“That’s right, honey,” John said patiently, closing his lion eyes, as I ranted about wanting pancakes. He’d grown accustomed to my crazy hazel-eyed moodiness, and he found humor in my harmless unpredictability.

Within minutes, the man I’ve been married to, who doesn’t even have a single strand of gray in his full-headed brown hair, began snoring insanely. I got out of bed and flipped on the lights to the kitchen to make pancakes at one o’clock in the morning.

All I can say is, being middle aged, there are stories to tell . . .

My pace slows involuntarily as I near the door to room 301. I stop and take a deep breath, hoping things on the other side of the door will miraculously be different, but I feel only pain flood my heart.

Monitors light the tiny room and an even tinnier person lies in the bed. My eyes take a few minutes to adjust, and I realize that I am holding my breath straining to see the rise and fall of the sheets. I find a chair and sit down quietly afraid of disrupting the strained breathing. When did everything in my life revolve around fear? Suddenly, fear has become the only constant in my life, my silent friend, a partner of sorts.

A stir causes me to sit up straight in the chair, and I strain to hear a voice call my name, but I hear only labored breathing, which fills the room. I relax a bit and allow my thoughts to wander. When did I get here? Since when did sadness become the only emotion in my life? Wasn’t it just yesterday that my mother sat in a chair like this one cradling my newborn daughter in her arms?

The roles have reversed, and I feel lost amid throes of confusion. I had always thought my mother would be around to see my daughter graduate from high school, yet here we are, unsure if she would see another sunrise.

I hold my mother’s cold hand, and I can’t help notice how frail she has become. Cancer has taken its toll on her; she no longer even resembles the vibrant woman I knew.

I look up and see my mother silently watching me as I gently rub lotion on her paper-thin, dry hands. Cancer has taken a lot from my mother but it has not touched her spirit. I look at her face and notice her mesmerizing hazel eyes; there is so much strength and love interlaced with peace.

She doesn’t say much anymore, as if she has run out of words. Her eyes do all the talking now.

Even though she is the one suffering with cancer, it is her strength that still guides me. We sit in silence, our fingers and hearts intertwined, our souls communicating on a different level.

Time passes ever so quickly, visiting hours are long over and I have to leave. She knows this and lightly squeezes my hand. This is the moment I dread the most, although no words escape my lips, they scream in my head, “Not yet, I am not ready to leave. Mom, there is so much I need to say, so much I have to share, so much I want to do with you.” Yet the words don’t come.

I stand holding her hand as I did when I was a little girl, on the first day of school. It dawns on me that whether or not I am ready to face this world without her, I will have no choice. So I kiss her forehead, tell her I love her and promise to return the next day.

I walk down the same long corridor and out into the cool night. How I hate this place, hate the smell, the tiled floor; everything reminds me of death.

I stop and look up at her dimly lit window. All I can hope for is to make the long walk back to room 301 tomorrow and to look into my mother’s eyes. Tomorrow, maybe tomorrow, I will say all the things I didn’t say today, because today I am not ready to say goodbye.

Thank you Erica for your insightful comment.