Tremors By Lucy Wormald (she/her)
Lucy explores the ever evolving relationship with her mum as she enters adulthood.
My mum and I are close. As many mothers and daughters are. She oftentimes feels like an absolute blister. In other moments she is seraphic. I am forever unworthy of her unconditional softness and I’m awed by her attentiveness. We understand each other in a way that cuts through a lot of
and “vision loss” and it was suddenly as if I was looking at my mother through a very long telescope. I imagined her little bespectacled head popping out of the white sheets, her beautiful hands stalling and struggling. Her fragility crashed into me and I felt an unfamiliar protectiveness.
bullshit, seeing both the glory and the
My mum had a stroke in early January. It wasn’t an earth-shattering one. There was no collapse or ambulance, no sickening moment of a life hanging in the balance. It was a measured lapse of a stroke, like a slow motion landslide or falling asleep. She woke up one morning and could not work out how to put on her
Her hands would not listen to her brain. She spent ten days in hospital after they did scans and found the bleeding in her brain. They pointed out the parts of her brain that had died and adorned them with results such as “left side neglect”
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and optimistic and lonely and distressed. She needed soothing and reassuring, simple conversation and reminding. I began to feel a remove between the mother I was accustomed to, and the in dynamic crystallised and cemented,
Her fragility crashed into me and I felt an unfamiliar protectiveness.
glasses. She went into the kitchen and dropped the coffee. She broke two mugs.
every day for hours. She was confused
woman I was talking to. As the change
unloveliness of the other. And she has always been my greatest comforter.
Instead, I talked to her on the phone
my clarity on what this transition meant for our relationship was muddied by the technological medium in which it was playing out. The slow understanding of this shift was akin to the feeling of glimpsing someone you know on a passing train. The moment slows and you can just catch a shard of their face. There is a lurching recognition and then
She told me how the patients around her were guarded by their children and she was met only by my dad. At this stage there had been no ease in travel restrictions and I was bound by a major lack of spare change and the risk of finding myself in a quarantine limbo.
uncertainty as you are whipped away and your mind scrambles to confirm what you’ve seen. The distance between me and my mother meant I could not know the full change the stroke had brought, I could only pass by its silhouette again and again.
