Will The Mom Know What To Do?
By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann
I lie on my stomach in the room with a window facing the road. My head turns to the left, my arms stretch out straight. My right cheek rests on a pile of sheets. I’m not too uncomfortable. The room is white and temperature warm but the cool of sterile gauze and latex-free gloves chills me. Also, I’m partially naked.
“Can you believe there’s no traffic?” the grey-haired technician asks offhandedly. She’s so kind, I think to myself; she is the same technician I had for my last MRI. She’s just making conversation, I know this, she’s passing time until we’re ready. She rests a firm and steadying hand on my shoulder, and does her best to engage my mind with her voice, distracting my heart from pounding its way right out of my chest.
I can’t shake my head, so I just say, “No, I can’t believe any of this—” and I mean any of this...the traffic, the pandemic, the reason I’m laying here.
The other technician in the room kneels down on my right. She’s vicing my breast between two plastic plates. When she’s finished, the physician walks in to check the placement and when the tech says, “She compresses well” I somehow take this as a compliment.
I’m here for a biopsy—another one. I already know I have cancer.
I found out in late January, two days after I’d done a public reading of an essay I wrote about getting my first mammogram, a week after I’d had my first biopsy. And even as I read the words “I am not afraid of getting cancer and dying. I’m not scared to find out something malevolent is growing inside of me” I had the thought: Wouldn’t it be ironic?
So yes, cancer. But also: early stage, slow growing, non-invasive. A shock and a relief.
At the time I found out, my biggest concern was if I could still go on a long-planned trip to Hawaii with my husband. “How soon will I need surgery?” I asked. “Can I wait until after?”
Of course, go, they said. Enjoy yourself.
So we did. And when we came home, I scheduled a surgery date. I pushed it off, even. I waited until it was convenient for me. And because they told me I could. And because none of us had a clue we’d be in a global pandemic right now.
***
When we start to self-distance, but before our state’s stay-at-home order, my neighbors decide to have one of their trees trimmed. My kids sit in the front yard watching the men swing ropes and wield chainsaws and chip branches into the bed of a truck.
But I stay inside.
I cannot handle men in trees. When I worked as a trauma nurse, I took care of men, only men, who fell from heights to their deaths, to paralysis, and there was one who forgot to let go of the chainsaw and cut off his arm. So I prefer to stay inside, to not watch what might not happen. But when I hear the men yelling, and from my window see them all waving their arms and standing with their legs spread out wide, my breath catches and I run out the door with a kitchen towel over my shoulder before I can even think about what I am doing.
But then I see: a baby squirrel, it’s lying almost flat, like a furry maple leaf, arms and legs outstretched in the middle of the road. I walk to my husband, who stands by the sidewalk. “A nest fell when they cut the branch,” he says. “The babies started to run. There’s another one here and one over there.” He gestures to the base of the crepe myrtle we’re standing five feet away from, and then across the street to a little grey ball clinging to the base of a red fire hydrant.
“What happened to the mom?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says.
The tree men shepherd the other two babies into a pile of logs my neighbor will keep in his yard for the next few days. For now, they are safe.
My kids join us on the sidewalk and we show them the one at the base of our tree. They ooh and ahhh and Can we keep him? long enough for me, in a moment of well, they are out of school that marries with I guess, technically, this is educational to say, “If you look up how to take care of it.” And before I turn around, they have a cardboard box lined with scraps of fabric and have Googled how to care for baby squirrels and have cut up apples and broccoli and have filled up a water bottle to keep him warm. “Hold on,” I say, drawing my words out long, but what’s done is done. A little squirrel hides under a piece of winnie-the-pooh fleece in a box sitting on our porch.
***
Before I was allowed entrance into the cancer center for this biopsy, a nurse flanked by a security guard took my temperature. The usually traffic-jammed roads are virtually empty. Everyone wears masks. My children learn through a screen. My husband works from our basement. Each new day, a bar graph gives us a heartbreaking lesson in exponential growth. I stay home, except for the grocery store--and appointments like these.
Each day, I face my mortality two-fold.
***
An hour after the tree cutters finish, I walk with the kids to the wood pile. One grey tail sticks out from between two logs and as a family we decide it’s best to let our squirrel join his siblings. “But what about the foxes?” the kids say. “It’s too cold!” they protest. And then, the one that gets me, “What if the mom doesn’t come get them?”
“Oh, she will,” I say, “the mama knows what to do.”
Dear God, I silently pray, please let the mama know what to do.
***
How are you? a friend texts, checking in.
At the moment, my four kids are under a magic spell of books, LEGOs, a pencil and paper drawing, and a computer math game. Right now, I’m good.
Hanging in there, I reply, not wanting to sound overly optimistic.
Then I return to reading another article with more numbers, more growing graphs. I’m emailed a request to pray because another friend’s brother-in-law/mother/uncle was just diagnosed with COVID-19. I receive another lengthy email from a teacher about distance learning. I take a call from my doctor, who tells me the MRI-guided biopsy shows another area of cancer.
I am no longer hanging in there.
***
Hours pass. I’ve walked past the babies twice. They’re still there, huddled together. The mother has not yet returned.
Will she come? What if her instincts don’t kick in? What if that unexpected fall from safety shook her so badly, traumatized her, scared her or hurt her, and she doesn’t come get them?
Please, I pray. Please.
***
Our days blend into each other. There’s no real end in sight. I’m doing my best to make life normal, but our normal used to involve a full and tightly choreographed schedule of activities we’d thoughtfully and purposefully picked. I know people all over the world are silver-lining the heck out of this slow down, seeing this family time as a gift, and while I do too, I’m also scared. I’m just getting by taking care of the people within my four walls. But I don’t really know how to manage this crisis well—the one growing inside my body or the one changing the world.
***
It’s dusk. I’m in the kitchen. Out our front window, movement catches my eye. I turn to the front of the house and see a squirrel across the street jumping—frantic, spastic, desperate.
“It’s her,” I gasp.
“Who?” my husband asks.
“The mom.”
There are hundreds of squirrels in our neighborhood, so when I say that I recognize this particular one, Chris looks at me with eyebrows raised. But this animal is not acting normal. She’s scattered. Distraught. She’s ... crying? I walk outside. And yes, she’s chirping. Over and over, repetitive and anguished.
Chris follows me outside. “How do you know it’s her?”
I don’t really. But somehow I recognize the behavior. The lost-ness, what do I do now-ness. The this-isn’t-what-was-supposed-to-happen-ness. She’s acting the way I would act if my nest fell out of a tree with my babies in it; if, out of nowhere, the world I lived in proved itself categorically unsafe.
***
I meet with the surgeon. We move up the date of the surgery. My husband will not be allowed to be with me, new hospital rules. I email my kids’ teachers and allow my children weeks on end of unstructured time.
Everything is different. New. Changed. The minute I get on the phone, my kids get quiet, they know I have important calls to take now. They know I write down what I hear, say, “uh huh” and “I see,” and “so that means …” They know I take long walks and do not whine when I decline their invitation to play.
They see me reading the news, talking with family, processing the information. I am not the mother I want to be right now, but at the same time, I can do nothing more.
We’ve never done this before. Any of this.
***
It is her.
As weird as it seems, it’s as if she—a squirrel of all things—and I are connected.
I do not move from where I stand in my driveway because I need her to do what I’m hoping she will do; what I hope I can do, what I hope for all of us.
The mama jumps onto the oak tree closest to where her babies hide. I listen to her chirp chirp chirp and see the flick flick flick of her tail. Then she waits, listens.
Is this really happening?
I hear small, high pitched squeaks and the mother moves slowly, incrementally down the tree. Closer, closer, closer.
“She’s getting her babies,” I breathe, nearly crying from the relief. It feels like I’m watching a miracle.
I don’t know what goes on in the mind of a mother squirrel. But I know this: if she can figure out how to care for her children after her world fell apart, so can we.
She disappears into the wood pile. Then she emerges, and, one by one, she carries her babies away.
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