By Rachel Weaver
In the way of five-year-olds, my kindergartener is convinced he knows sign language. He moves his hands and arms around in elaborate gestures that sometimes involve his hips, and then quizzes me on what he just said.
Usually it’s “Can I have some milk?” or “I love Mama.”
Today he gets that specific look on his face that means here comes some sign language. So I take a deep breath and try to focus on him through a fog of dizziness, my constant companion of 12 years. A specific version of migraine. Some days are worse than others, some aren’t too bad, but I feel seasick always. At least once a day, the room loosens, threatens to spin, sometimes does spin. My head has hurt for so long it has moved into my teeth. There is the simple exhaustion of no way out. But my five-year-old does not know any of this.
Most days I can act normal enough that no one knows how much it aches to move my eyes or the way my head is too clouded to think, or the way walls shimmer like curtains in a slight breeze. But sometimes I have to lie down to play Candyland or I need to go to bed at 6:30 in the evening. Because I don’t want him to grow up around someone who complains, I don’t complain. Because I don’t want him to believe that life is mostly hard and unforgiving, I don’t act like my life is mostly hard and unforgiving. And most days, convincing him, convinces me.
I want more than anything to protect him from the way life can rob you of yourself with no forewarning, I want more than anything to be a mom who jumps on swings, goes down the swirly slides, takes her kid skiing. I do not want to be defined by my illness and so I tuck it away deep within me and we do what I can do.
He stands in front me on our back deck, preparing, jostling from foot to foot. He rubs away his wild-eyed smile with his little hands and settles into a serious face. Apparently, sign language today is a serious matter.
He is so far away, the vast darkness of this illness stretching between us. I will not lose him to this, I think. I begin the process of clawing my way toward him. Some days, the dizziness sits in the corner of my mind, hands folded, with me, but not in my way. Today it is raging through my head, my heart, my mind. My son knows none of this, of course. I am sitting in a chair, two feet in front of him on a bright blue spring day, hiding my dizziness from him.
He starts with a palms up, wide-armed gesture, his chin jutted out, that in the adult world usually means What the hell?
But he’s decided it means Mama.
“Mama,” I say, decoding.
“Yes!” he screeches, and dances around. He races back to his position in front of me, drops his face back into the serious look. Next, he holds out one hand, palm down, puts all the fingers of his other hand underneath and turns them in a slow circle. This is a new one.
“What’s that the sign for?” I ask.
He drops his hands as his face pulls into a slow smile. The deck moves like the surface of a lake underneath him. I wonder how much longer I can stand it, what will happen when I can no longer maintain the distance between how I feel and how I act.
He peers into my eyes and says, “That means I will love you when you’re all twisted up.”
Rachel Weaver is the author of the novel Point of Direction, which Oprah Magazine named a Top Ten Book to Pick Up Now. Point of Direction was chosen by the American Booksellers Association as a Top Ten Debut for Spring 2014 and won the 2015 Willa Cather Award for Fiction. Rachel is on the faculty in the MFA Program at Regis University in Denver, Colorado.