Better than this

My mother’s basement flooded on Friday, and I drove up to help her yesterday.

Sometimes, I think I am at my best in a crisis. I was laying out tarp, moving boxing, saving precariously balanced plastic bins full of antique paper mâché doll bodies, directing a pair of teenage boys on which boxes to save first and where to put them. Telling my mother that even though her hot water heater was out of commission, her dishwasher would heat its own water. Talking to the plumber because I knew my mother was overwhelmed.

But I knew even as I was driving up to her house that what she wanted was a shoulder to cry on. That she wanted me to join her in mourning the loss of her precious objects. But I couldn’t do it.

I always feel a flash of resentment when my mother needs me to be her emotional support. So many years of being the first person she turned to for everything wrong with her life, including all the ways that I myself was disappointing her. All the years of feeling like I had to be the adult and to parent myself, because neither of my actual parents were able to do it. And, then, more recently, all the years of therapy trying to unlearn everything I had to do to look after myself.

So when I dug down looking for empathy, there wasn’t much there.

And, so, yesterday, after three hours of moving boxes, and slipping on icy steps, and getting zapped by wet extension cords, I knew that she wanted more from me. And so I told her that I wasn’t sure that I could support her in the way she wanted me to. That I was better when there was something tangible that needed doing. And she seemed to accept that.

It was an exhausting day.

I threw out a lot of clothes that I had been holding onto for some reason. But faced with tipped over boxes of clothes that will never fit me again, cold and wet and unmanageably heavy, it was very freeing to just send them to the dump.

I drove home in the snow, unable to see out my rear windshield. The back of the car filled with the stuff of mine I’d been able to salvage from my mother’s basement. Wedding china I’m not sure I want, rescued from disintegrating cardboard boxes and stuffed into heavy black garbage bags. Singing along to High as Hope and trying to avoid having to change lanes.