Looking for a Sign

So, the thing is… I was looking for a sign.

Years ago, when my oldest daughter Ana was very small, I took her to visit my parents. It was a slightly tense visit. I was so hypersensitive to everything that first year of my parenting career and kept imagining that my mother was being critical of the way I did things. Driving home, Ana fell asleep and I fell into a dark and contemplative mood. I was angry at myself for still being so insecure at thirty-something and the truth is, I DIDN’T know what the heck I was doing as a mom. Or if I was doing the right thing by staying home with my kids. Or heck, by even HAVING children, given the state of the world. What I needed, I thought, was some sort of sign.

Just at that moment, one of those Good Times vans passed me on the highway. Except that instead of the wheel cover on the back saying something like “Don’t Come Knockin’ if this Van is Rockin,’” it was painted with a picture of Jesus. And Jesus looked EXACTLY like Chuck Norris! Well, I mean, if you can imagine Chuck Norris with a crown of thorns and a trickle of blood down his face. I couldn’t help it; I just cracked up. I was looking for a sign, but that wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.

Time passed and I settled into my role as a mom and both Ana and I flourished. On my thirty-fifth birthday, my husband and I gave big party, just to celebrate life in general. Ana was almost two, which seemed like a big milestone, and we’d had a wonderful year meeting our neighbors and becoming part of the community. It was a spectacular Indian summer day (except it was in February since we live in Texas) and I was wearing my favorite jeans (and actually breathing at the same time) and my neighbor Tracy had made this incredible chocolate birthday cake as a surprise and it had (I’m not kidding) chopped candy bars all over the top. Life was just so good. Our friends gathered around and sang Happy Birthday while I stood there and blushed. As I looked at those faces, I knew exactly what to wish for when I blew out the candles: More. More long days of watching the sunset, surrounded by the people I love. More time to watch my child (we had only one at the time) grow and thrive. More of that sense of belonging, of being loved, of being at peace. More cake. More.

This past week, I went to the doctor to find out if there was anything we could do about the increasing severity and frequency of my migraine headaches. We discussed various next steps and possible causes and he sent me to have a CT or “cat” scan, just to rule out any kind of physical abnormality as a cause.

Well, it’s a pity those scans don’t show things like the area of the brain where my overactive imagination resides because I’m sure you can imagine how I spent the week, right? Yep. I walked around for a week, getting my affairs in order so I’d be able to battle, and then die of, brain cancer. I could picture it, down to the shape of my head after I’d lost all my hair from the chemotherapy. I found myself gazing at my children, my eyes welling with tears as I pictured saying goodbye to them. I could see my husband remarrying (the rat) so that the girls would still have a mother around. I TOLD myself I was overreacting, I TOLD myself that I was behaving like a crazy woman, but I just couldn’t reason with me.

So, obviously, I don’t have some enormous brain tumor (although I just might have a chronic sinus infection.) The scan showed a normal brain, which seems wrong given my behavior, I know. But the week was not a total loss. It was actually an interesting exercise to think about my own mortality and what I’d like my legacy to be when I really DO leave this world –at the age of ninety-something, of natural causes, in my sleep.

And I came to a big realization. I realized that although I have dreams about what my kids will be when they grow up and hope for their lives as productive and loving people, the thing I want most for them is that they be HAPPY. I hope they’ll look back with fondness at their childhoods with their (crazy) mother. I hope I can teach them to live their lives fearlessly and with few regrets. I hope that they will have many long Indian summer days, surrounded by friends and family. That they will never be so driven that they can’t appreciate a perfect piece of chocolate cake, with a big chunk of Heath bar on the top. Both of my girls have such enormous potential and I am sure they will accomplish so much in their lives. But for me, I will feel like my life has been a success if they are happy and if they know how happy they have made me.

So, I got the call from my doctor and breathed a big sigh of relief and returned to the dinner table. It was one of those evenings where I’d fixed exactly the right thing and Ana had eaten well and Jane had actually eaten AT THE TABLE. I sat across from her and cheered her on in her efforts to manipulate her spoon. She finished her chicken and put the spoon down and pushed her plate across to me. “More, peez,” she said.

Exactly.

I think it was a sign.

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Barbara Cooper is the mother of Ana (4) and Jane (22 months). She lives in Austin, Texas and is never very successful when reasoning with herself.