Of Sons and Ovaries
by Jan Seale
The morning of surgery the temperature outside is 2 degrees Fahrenheit. At 6:00, we walk through a pastel carpeted tunnel connecting the hotel to the hospital. I have no purse. I don’t wear my watch or ring. I have on no make-up. On either side, holding hands with me, are two of my favorite men, my 67-year-old husband and my 39-year-old son. Both are here to help me through a “procedure,” as the medical community has dubbed the laity’s old-fashioned “operation” or “surgery.”
This is “major surgery,” as I heard it used in my childhood. This is opening me up from stem to stern to remove a tumor, along with a uterus and ovaries with an expired “use-by” date, and to patch a hernia. Definitely major.
My husband Carl has come with me from South Texas to Minnesota to be a loyal support. My son Erren has come to be the patient advocate and bedside nurse. He and I don’t know how this is going to work, but since I don’t have a daughter, and women friends are not free, we have to try the arrangement. On the plane, we agree that we’re moving into unknown territory, that there are no instruction kits for this event. We also agree that we have to leave our inhibitions at home.
And what does Erren know about nursing? He majored in commercial art and is a successful businessman. He’s single, and without children. Back in our hometown on the Texas-Mexican border, Erren co-owns Vida, an antique and cultural arts store. He lives 20 blocks from us, in a two-story stucco house surrounded by palms and bougainvillea. He has two brothers, both fathers and husbands, also with careers.
Why would I need Erren when my husband is coming with me? Carl has mid-stage Parkinson’s disease. He nods off a number of times a day, has waning strength, and cannot react quickly. My only sister, and sibling, is tending our aged parents back in Texas. My closest friend has a ski trip, long planned, with her family.
Can Erren do this intimate job? How will I feel about letting him? These things we don’t know, but we’re about to find out.
I wake up a few hours later with the same men holding my hands. They bend to kiss me, say, “It was benign.” Benign: the most blessed word in the language.
And then begins a series of days and nights all run together and shot through with a mix of pain, laughter, and problem-solving.
The black morphine trigger gets lost in the covers a half dozen times a day and Erren is there to help me find it, laugh with me as I say, “Gimme that sucker!” and push it firmly to deliver niceness to my pained body. By day, he is in and out, tending to my needs. By night, he sleeps in the fold-down chair beside my bed.
We develop a routine. “I have to go,” I say.
He begins unplugging from their outlets all the tubes attached to me. “Is it pee or poo?” he asks, capping off my tubes, pinning them to my nightgown. Each time he asks, he makes me laugh, with these silly, useful terms. Whichever, he adjusts his speed. The IV pole must be changed to the other side of the bed, the bed lowered, and me assisted to my feet. We shuffle to the bathroom, he steadies me, positions the IV pole, and stands outside the door listening and waiting until I’m finished. Sometimes he hands a pad through the door. Sometimes he calls the nurse.
So we are working out what we thought might be hard for us.
For Erren’s part, I marvel how he apparently intuits what a post-op, foggy-headed mother needs, and lovingly supplies it. Day by day, sailing uncharted waters, mother and son are discovering a new continent, a new way of being to each other.
We have changed places, at least for now. Like a parent, he nurtures, acts with authority, coddles and cajoles. I respond to his direction, laugh, at times am cranky and uncooperative, and end up feeling secure, cradled.
This new role-playing reminds me of another time in our adult mother/son journey. One summer several years ago, Erren, his father, and I vacationed in the Big Apple. Entering the Great Hall of the beautifully restored Ellis Island Immigration Museum, the three of us studied together a chart showing the swell of 12 million immigrants through those doors in the first half of the 20th century.
Then, for a little while, I wandered off from the two of them, studying something that caught my eye. After a bit, I realized a thing I had only partially been aware of in the preceding days of sightseeing: I could pick out the voice of our adult son almost anywhere in a noisy, crowded space.
Not that his voice was distinguished in some extraordinary way. But all the while that I thought I had been giving full attention to the displays, I was tethered to him and his father by his voice in their conversation. The mother-child bond had been minding the store, thank you, thirty-something years after its beginning.
Absently staring at the displays, I began actually testing out what I had just discovered. A young Hispanic woman called to her husband across the Great Entry Hall, “¡Traemelo!,” and the man brought the toddler to his mother.
It was one of those rare moments when one's understanding clears, and the puzzle pieces fit. “Bring him to me,” my mother self had said, and my ears homed in on our son’s voice, reassuring me he was there for his father and me.
My mind flipped back to a diorama we’d seen the day before in the Museum of Natural History. In an imagined “first family” depiction, a skinny little womanoid with a baby shoos away a jackal while a hairy little manoid pokes at an antelope carcass.
The human family is still the basic unit. Nations are just families of families. From the Central Europeans, vacant-eyed from their weary weeks at sea in l904, to the malnourished Mexican woman whose entry point was "Beeville, Texas - l918.”
We need to be able to move about in the crowded room of earth and still pick up the voices of our individual families, to claim their love and support.
Among the hours of convalescence, there is time to talk, something we have not had in a couple of decades. Between words, we stare out the window at snowflakes drifting down, enjoying a weather event absent in our South Texas subtropics.
One day at sunset, Erren notices a huge flock of crows flying into town to roost in trees on the hospital grounds. And from then on, the three of us make a ritual of watching, waiting at sunset, for the great sky-darkening throng.
And there is time to laugh. When a change of dressing reveals a swollen hump at the top of my incision in the middle of my diaphragm, Erren promptly names the protrusion the “Boob-ette.”
There are hitches in my recovery, and no mother-son handbook tells us how to respond. Some nights I vomit helplessly. I’m sure it couldn’t have been any fun for him in the relay of the two aqua kidney-shaped pans between the bathroom and my retching. Those nights we are lucky to get an hour or two of sleep, before my digestive system acts up again. We figure out that I can doze off if Erren will reach his hand through the safety bars from his position in the chair by the bed, and gently draw circles on my back.
When I develop a superficial infection in one of the drain tube openings on my right side, Erren bends over the ovary site, working to get the tape to stick properly. When a new bag is attached to my IV pole, I hear him asking “What’s this?” I hear him taking care of my insurance clearance, exchanging the orange juice for apple juice, and asking the doctor if I could be allergic to a medication. I hear him urging his father to go back to the hotel for the night. I relax. This grown son seems to know intuitively what it takes to nurture his mother back to health.
And as I write this, months later, I am thankful for the mysterious bonds between mother and son, for connections that don’t end when the son is weaned, or goes off to college. With luck, the bonds reshape through the years, changing from simple bloodlines to overlays of love and experience.
Tweaked by a little magic and a lot of living, a mother and her adult son, become — dear friends.
Jan Seale teaches workshops in memoir, writing, and creative living for women. Her latest book is The Wonder Is: New and Selected Poems (Panther Creek Press).
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