Your mother won’t forget you right away. There will be plenty of time to prepare logistically and emotionally for this event. You’ll become accustomed to the usual symptoms over the course of months or years: forgetting appointments, tripping over the names of acquaintances, the first missed birthday. When she begins to fumble overlong with her seatbelt, you will buckle it for her without overthinking the sad poetry of this role reversal. Next come the bills. Then the pills.

You will notice with empathy and significant sadness the first time your mother mistakes her husband for someone else, a stranger in her home. You will console him and acknowledge, with your hand on his shaking shoulder, that this will also be your fate, that he must not take her mistake to heart. “She still loves you,” will become a mantra. Also, “It’s the disease talking.”

There will be occasions in which she stares at you blankly or doesn’t greet you in the usual way. In these moments you will inwardly suspect that the day has come, that your mother has forgotten you. But these instances will bring no particular reaction; by this time you have learned to regulate your emotions, to place your terror in a small lockbox just below your lungs, near your diaphragm.

The day she forgets you will begin like any other. You spend the night at her house to provide respite for her husband, who is frequently overwhelmed. You suggest that the two of you go out to breakfast. And then your mother, just as casually, tells you that she needs to consult her daughter about that.

“Well,” you say lightly, “that’s me.”

“No, my daughter Heather.”

“Yeah, I’m Heather, Mom. That’s me. I’m your daughter.”

“You are?”

Such a small exchange. You’ve had more absurd conversations than this one. Many more. But these words fit right into the keyhole of your lockbox, and the terror comes pouring out—from your eyes, your nose, your mouth, your fingertips. (This is painful and chaotic, but temporary. The terror depressurizes and expends itself.) Crying brings the usual headache, but the physical pain is a welcome placeholder, something to put in the strange new hole created by her words.

The hardest part, you find, is not the terror or the tears or the headache, but the way your mother consoles you as one might console a stranger they’ve found weeping in an aisle of the supermarket. “Oh, honey,” she says, patting your shoulder. “It’ll be okay.”

Later, her brain goes to work justifying her mistake. You may find the disease easier to cope with when conversation tips toward the absurd. It frequently will.

“How long have you been my daughter?” she asks.

“My whole life,” you say, hiding the exasperation in your voice. You’re rolling with it. Your head is still pounding, and you are pretending to read while your mother toasts a pop tart. She’s forgotten about going out to breakfast.

“So I’m your… sister.” She watches one pop tart toasting and nibbles at the second one straight from the foil.

“No, you’re my mother.”

“I’m your mother?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s wonderful. To think I have a daughter like you.” The pop tart is beginning to smoke. She turns to you with her hands on her hips, the way she has a million times, your whole life. “That’s just fantastic.”

If this were a movie, we’d roll the credits here. It’s a really lovely way to end things. But you’re only just beginning.

“I’m your sis—”

“Mother.”

“Your mother, that’s right.” She stares out the window. “Sometime I’d like you to tell me the story of how you came to be someone else’s daughter.”

This throws you for a second, like a question with a double negative. “I’ve never been anyone else’s daughter, Mom. I’ve only ever been your daughter.”

“That’s incredible.”

“I know.”

Now she’s sitting at the table, eating one burnt pop tart and one cold one, sipping at the coffee she found in a mug in the microwave. There’s an edge to her now. Something else in her eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell me all this time that you were my daughter?” It is an accusation.

“This is the first time you haven’t known it.”

“That’s incredible,” she says again, but she doesn’t mean it in the same way.

“I know,” you say, and you don’t mean it in the same way, either.

___

Heather Shaw is an award-winning writer, editor, writing coach, crossword enthusiast, and distance runner. She lives on a historic century farm in Newark, Ohio, where she is at work on a full-length memoir about her mother and how memory and its loss shape our relationships. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Best of Ohio Short Stories, Best of Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and Midland: Reports from Flyover Country.

Artwork by Shelley Lennox Whitehead