Tiny Little Mother Mind™ Thoughts, Part -3,456,788

because the tiny little mother mind™ thinks negatively

I’m one out of three — can you guess which one?

Evidently, my Letter to Patient Services in which I recount our latest experience in the Emergency Department of a world-class healthcare facility, was escalated according to the poor soul who was assigned — well — me. I will keep you posted on any reparations. I love the word escalated when used in the Medical World. The tiny little mother mind™ feels slightly important. I think of a soul, escalating. Where will our souls go?

As soon as we arrived in Florence , my anxiety and worry about Sophie really did disappear. I don’t know if it was the literal distance or the sudden immersion in a city that I remember as my favorite, but as I walked through the winding, dark streets of Florence , I felt as if I were twenty-one, again. My aunts and my mother took hours in the morning to get going, so on the third day or so I decided that I’d wake early and strike out on my own. I would meet them by noon at our hotel where we would catch a taxi that would take us to the train station and onward to Rome and the rest of our trip. When I set out that morning, it was barely past dawn and the streets were quiet. I intended to visit the David, again, as well as my favorite painting, Fra Angelico’s fresco at San Marco.*

What rankles is the unconscious bias against people like Sophie, even in a medical setting. I know that this is true. The moment I think it, I know it. This is the way truth works. The way insight strikes. A hit. Think about it (the unconscious bias) because I really don’t want to write about it. It’s triggering, like the young folks say, and you don’t want to trigger the tiny little mother mind.™

When I took Sophie to a doctor’s appointment this week, I parked in the 300 building parking lot like I usually do and then realized that there was no 4 button in the escalator and no fourth floor in the 300 building because the appointment was actually in another 300 building, and They had forgotten to tell me. It was the hottest day of the century, and there wasn’t time to actually go back to the car, get Sophie loaded in and then drive across the way to the right 300 building, so we walked there. Did I say how cosy it was outside? 100 degrees? I am grateful that the caregiver was with me because I had to be on my best behavior and couldn’t possibly sit on the road and weep profusely, much less pull an Anna Karenina on Westwood.

I went to the monastery first and quietly walked through the tiny cells, each adorned with one beautiful Fra Angelico fresco. I marveled, again, at the suddenness of the painting The Annunciation, up some stairs and around a corner it surprises you, shocks you, really, with its hundreds of years old color, its strange perspective and haunting subject. The Angel has descended and kneels, his hands folded over his chest, his face intense with the news he must deliver. His remarkable wings are like some strange bird’s, each feather tipped with color, spreading out from yellow to red to blue and back to a rich burgundy before tipping out in a celestial blue. The Virgin sits on a simple bench, her hands folded similarly, her deep blue robes pooling at her feet. Her face, though, is pale and heavy. The Angel has just told her, I believe, that she will bear the son of God. This is unimaginable to us, but Fra Angelico has painted the scene with a painful intimacy, the colors and clearness speak of belief. I am silenced by this painting of a mother who will know incredible sorrow; her narrow, rounded shoulders seem to have already accepted the burden.

A lovely and intelligent young social worker intern that was observing in this specialty clinic in the Other 300 Building (an appointment for Sophie I had literally waited on for months, hence the trek through the desert to get there, goddamnit) asked me kindly if I had resources, and I told her yes, I do. A wealth of resources. I also told her that I was burnt out and relied on bitter humor and a keen sense of absurdity to get me through. Given the heat and sweat that was still pouring from my scalp (and dripping down my face and back), I must have made a pretty picture. I talk a lot to these kinds of professionals because they ask me questions before they realize what they’ve gotten themselves into, and the tiny little mother mind™ actually has it all going on up there. Full of words, she is. Words, words, words.

Hot outside and glaring bright, the softness of the morning had given way to high noon, and the streets were full of people. I regretfully made my way back to my mother and my aunts, picking my way through the swarm of tourists around the Duomo of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. The piazza that surrounds it is enormous, the cobblestones rubbed smooth and hard by centuries. There aren’t any trees or flowers or plants of any kind there, only stone and the enormous cathedral rising out of it, the tower one of the most familiar in Florence . I remember bells ringing the noon hour and still feeling spell-bound by the art that I had just seen. I felt like a speck, insignificant, and I was glad of it. My troubles and grief felt distant, and not just literally. There’s something about visiting such ancient places and knowing that millions of lives have been lived that takes away the terror of my own.

When we were finished, I told the caregiver to wait with Sophie in the building while I went back to The Original 300 Building, and I set out again into the great outdoors which for lack of a better description felt truly like a furnace, the medical edifice in front of me a kind of gates of hell thing and familiar. I descended into the parking garage and, as predicted, could not remember where I’d parked the car. I wandered here, there, probably staggering, it’s truly too much for the tiny little mother mind™ and could not find it. I was dripping with sweat again, but the caregiver — bless her a million times — texted me the exact location of the car which was somewhere over in the next town, and I made my way to the topside world, there and then to her and Sophie and then home.

And then, in front of me, a woman fell. Right to the ground with a smack on the hard stone. A pool of blood seeped out from under her head, immediately. Pigeons, startled, flew up and away, their wings flapping like a scene in a movie. Someone screamed and then more people screamed. I looked down and saw the girl begin to jerk, her head banging on the stone, her legs jerking and spreading, her skirt hiked up and her crotch revealed, her white underwear. For a second I stood there as people ran up to us, a man crouched down in front of her. I think I heard the whistle of the police.

At home, I collapse and lie flat on my back, stare at the ceiling.

"A seizure!" I thought. I might have said it aloud. "A seizure! She’s having a seizure!" I watched her head again as it banged up and down on the stone, her mouth a stiff grimace, saliva bubbling out and down her chin, thrust upwards, and I knelt to pull her dress between her legs as they thrashed. In the same moment, I yelled for someone to help, to put something under her head, but police had arrived and they stuck their shiny, metal whistles in their mouth and screamed for everyone to back off, to get away. When I stood, the seizure had already ended and the young woman lay, spent, her eyes closed, her head turned to the side, her legs splayed. The police continued to scream at us and I wanted to say,"“No. You don’t understand. I know this. I know what to do. This is what I do. I can help." But I don’t speak Italian, so I turned my back and stumbled away, my eyes blurry with the light and tears.

I’ve been talking to Sophie these days. She looks deeply into my eyes as I ramble. I apologize. Tell her that I’m doing my best. I remind her of our life together, New York City, the blue whale in the Museum of Natural History, how we sat under it, its light, how much we drove around San Diego, La Jolla, Carlsbad and Del Mar, all the places we visited, the beads in shoeboxes, all the nights awake, the bowls of pasta, her humming, the long hallways in office buildings, the elevators and garages, the trees.

"I can’t believe that you had to go through that," someone said.

Really, most people will go through their entire lives and never see anyone have a seizure. I have seen tens of thousands of them. Six thousand miles from my home, I had attempted for a few hours that morning to lose myself in the art that had defined me in my early twenties. Looking at one painting and one sculpture, I had felt my perspective for the moment recede, become blessedly unimportant. The woman who fell before me, though, was immediate. She might have been Sophie. I felt as if I knew her and I stooped to protect her, to fix her legs, to cover her and protect her dignity.

I have written of the woman I saw fall numerous times on campus when I was in college, and I wonder if she and the woman who fell in front of me in the piazza in Florence keep me bounded, frame my life and bring it back to me as it should be.

It was my birthday last week. An odd birthday as Sophie was in the hospital. Or not really odd because she came home the day after. I am sixty-one now and she will be thirty in March. The word escalate. Souls, our two. Too.

If I were a painter I might draw that scene in Florence, the duomo, the stones, the small circle of blood, the woman’s turned head, quiet after the seizure, no one else there and light blurring out toward the edges.

* italicized bits are excerpted from a long-ago essay that came to my mind tonight