to tell them went deeper than my natural inclination toward reticence, deeper than the typical embarrassment of introducing family members to friends. It was that I worked in a lab full of people who would see my mother, see her illness, and understand things about her that the general public never could. I didn’t want them to look at her and see a problem to be solved. I wanted them to see her at her best, but that meant that I was doing what everyone else did, trying to dress up depression, trying to hide it. For what? For whom?
Had I known she was coming, I would have adjusted my schedule so that I’d have something cool to show her, a surgery or a training session. Instead, I showed her the behavioral testing chamber, now empty, the tools in my lab, unused.
“Where are the mice?” she asked.
I pulled out Han’s because they were closest to me. They were sleeping in their box, eyes closed, curled up, cute.
“Can I hold one?”
“They can get kind of jumpy, so you have to be careful, okay?”
She nodded, and I caught one and handed it to her.
She held the mouse in both hands, brushed her thumb over its head, and one of its eyes opened, rolled back as if to find her, before closing again. My mother laughed and my heart leapt at the sound.
“Do you hurt them?”
I had never fully explained my work to my mother. Whenever I did tell her about it, I used only the most scientific, most technical of terms. I never used the words “addiction” or “relapse,” I said “reward seeking” and “restraint.” I didn’t want her to think about Nana, to think about pain.
“We try to be as humane as possible and we don’t use animals if we can do things another way. But sometimes we do cause them some discomfort.”
She nodded and carefully placed the mouse back in its box, and I wondered what she was thinking. The day my mother had come home to find me and Nana tending to the baby bird, she told us that it wouldn’t live because we had touched it. She took it up in her hands as the two of us begged her not to hurt it. Finally, she just shrugged and gave it back to us. In Twi, she said, “There is no living thing on God’s Earth that doesn’t come to know pain sometime.”
* * *
—
In the final stage of Mahler’s separation-individuation theory of child development, babies begin to become aware of their own selves, and in so doing start to understand their mothers as individuals. My mother walking around my lab, observing things, showing tenderness toward a mouse when she rarely showed tenderness toward any living creature, all while in the depths of her depression, deepened this lesson for me. Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes. She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn’t me. I forget this and relearn it anew because it’s a lesson that doesn’t, that can’t, stick. I know her only as she is defined against me, in her role as my mother, so when I see her as herself, like when she gets catcalled on the street, there’s dissonance. When she wants for me things that I don’t want for myself—Christ, marriage, children—I am angry that she doesn’t understand me, doesn’t see me as my own, separate person, but that anger stems from the fact that I don’t see her that way either. I want her to know what I want the same way I know it, intimately, immediately. I want her to get well because I want her to get well, and isn’t that enough? My first thought, the year my brother died and my mother took to bed, was that I needed her to be mine again, a mother as I understood it. And when she didn’t get up, when she lay there day in and day out, wasting away, I was reminded that I didn’t know her, not wholly and completely. I would never know her.
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And yet sometimes I would look at her and I would see it, that which is alive and shivering in all of us, in everything. She would hold a mouse, hold my hand or my gaze, and I would catch a glimpse of the very essence of her. Please don’t go, I thought when I drove her home from the lab