When I was little, my parents did the best they could to sheild my brother and me from the fact that she was so sick. We'd go visit her in the hospital and I thought it was cool to change the dressing on her head when I got older. It's funny the things you think are normal as a kid are astonishing to other people when you tell them what you lived through. Now, as an adult, I see the gaps in my childhood left by those (almost monthly at times) trips to the ER for a bout of bacterial meningitis or a shunt malfunction.

I remember one year my cousin and I went to day camp over the summer. We started late, almost a week after the other kids we knew, but I never knew why. Turns out, my mom had surgery a few weeks before that. It seems to be a strange thing to just forget, and people can't really believe it when I tell them that those surgeries all ran into each other. In fact, my parents never even pulled us out of school when my mom would go in. I even prided myself on the fact that I could pack a hosptial bag faster than anyone else in my family.

Even now, working in a hospital, I see the kids who are in and out constantly with cancer, Crohn's disease, and yes, even those shunt malfunctions so common to my own life. I even catch myself wondering what life is like for them, in and out and back and forth so much. I stop myself when I see those kids going home with IV's and medicines and all of that stuff and I think about how hard it must be. Then I catch myself and I think, jeez, I know what it's like beacuse I was there once. That stuff happened in my life too. It's crazy that I can forget the nurse coming to the house twice a week to administer IV meds, and how I watched my mom flush her lines with saline.

Just beacuse my mom isn't in and out of surgery as much doesn't mean that I still don't live it. I'm even more aware now and I don't know if I am gratefult for that or if I really just wish I could go back to not knowing the magnitude of what was happening around me. I hate to say this, I don't want anyone reading this to think badly of me, but I find it hard now more than ever not to resent my mother for the things I have to do for her that she can't do for herself. I hate the way she asks me the same question for a fourth time because she can't remember that it was already asked and answwered three times before that. I remember that I could never have friends over because mom was always sick and that never really bothered me then. So I'm not sure why, years later it naws at me.

I don't ever remember my mom being in pain when I was little, I'm sure it was excruciating. So why now when she has so few problems with her head and no surgeries since 1996 does she scream like someone is plunging a knife into her heart when she gets up from the couch? And why do I get so annoyed when she does it? Why do want to run as far away from her as I can, scream at her to shut up, that no one cares and we're all tired of it? I have no other way to describe our relationship at times other than that she drains me. I love her, don't know what I'd do without her, but I feel as if she's killing me. When all is said and done, I don't want to remember her with all this anger. I want to remember the real woman who is my mother: kind, caring, hilarious, and not as the burden I am beginning to see her as now. Through all of this I keep asking myself how I got so selfish and mean and resentful. . . and where the heart I know I used to have has gone.