I Want to be Just Like Mommy

We don't look alike, and any outsider would think we were just a random pair. With chocolate eyes, black hair and tan skin my mother is the polar opposite to my fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes. But she and I, as we like to say, are soul mates.

As long as I can remember my mother and I have been frenemies. Best friends at times, sharing everything, laughing and crying together, loving one another with no end. On the other side of the spectrum we have been enemies, arguing over boys, grades, and how I should spend my money. Although our relationship does have its ups and downs I know my mother is definitely a woman I can trust and count on completely.

My mother has never had a job, she always openly admits she went to school to get her "Mrs. Degree." She and my dad decided that my mom could stay home to raise the children and he would make the living. Having been born on Long Island, my mother eagerly welcomed the idea of becoming a Southern stay-at-home mom.

She took me to school every morning and was there to pick me up in the afternoons. When I was younger I didn't realize how lucky my two sisters and I were to have a mother that was always around. When other children in our classes were going to after school programs or daycare, we were at home spending quality time with mommy.

When I was twelve my mom got pregnant and was having twins, a boy and a girl. I was ecstatic. I already had two younger sisters, and now there would be two more little ones for me to help my parents raise. In all the fuss and excitement over the twins arrival, no one in my family stopped to notice my mother's decline in health.

The day she went into labor, October 7, 1998, she also went into congestive heart failure caused by hyperthyroidism: a condition in which the female hormone-producing gland works over-time. She was rushed to Duke Hospital where she had emergency open heart surgery to remove the six liters of fluid surrounding her tired, dying, enlarged heart.

After her surgery she went through a radiation treatment to kill her thyroid. The process took only one day, but she had to stay at Duke Hospital for two months to be monitored. At the beginning of every day during those two months I was told my mom probably wouldn’t live to see the next, but she kept pushing through, and miraculously made it through alive.

She lost 45 pounds during this ordeal, enough to make her weigh an astonishing 90 pounds, right after giving birth to twins. When she was brought back home her once long, thick black hair had begun falling out in patches. She, physically, was a completely different woman, but a smile never left her face.

Over time my mom began to gain her strength back, and when the twins were six months old she was able to hold them without anyone standing by for support. She was slowly but surely getting back to her old self. Now eight years later, my mom is once again the healthy and happy mother I grew up with.

I talk to my mom every day, and our relationship is stronger than ever. She has shown me all the things I want to be when I have children. I admire her so much for having the strength to endure all she has gone through with a smile on her face. I know it can be scary or even depressing for young girls think that one day they’ll grow up to “be their mother." But for me, there isn’t anything better to aspire up to be.