With hesitation, I took the few steps to her bedside. I struggled with what to call her but in the end I went with the only name I knew her by. “Mum.”
She motioned to the chair next to her bed. “Sit, baby.”
I hated that word on her lips, but I silenced that thought. Sitting, I asked, “How are you feeling?”
She shrugged. “I’m okay. The docs are looking after me well.”
“That’s good.” God, this conversation was so stilted.
“I want to know about you, baby. How are you?”
My eyes widened. Did she mean in general? Or how had I been for the last twenty years? Her question threw me and I was lost for words.
“Sophia?” she nudged me.
Without warning, my emotions surged forward and took over, and as the words fell from my mouth, I couldn’t stop them even if I wanted to. Standing, I threw my words at her as if they were all the hurt she’d ever given me – the hurt I had desperately wanted to throw back at her my whole life. “If you’re asking me how I am today – now – I’m good. Amazing even. But if you, by any chance, want to know how I’ve been for the last twenty years – since you last saw me – I’ve been up and down, to hell and back. All because of you.” I stopped for a moment to catch my breath, and then continued. “I don’t know why I came here today, but perhaps it was to ask you for one thing. Please tell me how a mother can walk away from her daughter and her husband when he’s on life support, dying? Did you feel any guilt over that? Or did you just carry on with your life and build another family? Another family that you incidentally screwed over, too.”
She sat staring at me, blinking – blinking away the tears that she didn’t deserve to even have. “Baby - ”
“No! Don’t call me that. You don’t get to call me that!” I yelled at her, my heart beating wildly, and my
body pulsing with adrenalin.
“You don’t understand…your father and I were over long before his accident.”
I stared at her. “And what about me? Were we over, too? How does a parent even get to decide something like that? I was nine. Nine!”
“I wasn’t mentally stable. It was better for you that I left. I did it for you.” Her eyes were pleading with me to understand, but this was something I would never understand.
I shook my head. “No. You left for yourself, and even if you left for me, you should have come back. You should have gotten the help you needed, after you made sure I was okay, and then you should have come back. That’s what a mother does. They don’t just abandon their child when shit gets too hard…oh, my God, I can’t even look at you right now.” I turned away from her, my mind and body a mess of emotions and thoughts and hate. The hate was consuming me so much I felt like I would vomit. Clutching my stomach, I focused on my breathing and willed myself not to throw up.
And then my phone rang.
I ignored it.
I also ignored the pleas of my mother.
My phone rang again.
And again.
And all the while, my mother sobbed in her bed.
She had no right to sob.
No fucking right.
My phone rang again.
Shit.
I snatched it out of my bag and answered it without even checking who it was. “Hello,” I snapped.
A pause. And then, “Sophia, are you okay?”
Griff.
A sense of calm washed over me at his voice.