This morning, as she was rushing around trying to get out the door to work, my mom slipped on the stairs. She only slipped a couple of steps, and stayed on her feet and she's totally fine, so no worries. But she yelled out of surprise. I was sitting at the dining room table, which is essentially at the top of the stairs, so when I heard the thump of her slipping and her yell, I thought she had fallen down the stairs--I screamed bloody murder. Well, actually, I screamed, "Mom!"...
and then immediately started sobbing uncontrollably. Even though she was completely fine, I couldn't stop crying for almost ten minutes. It was literally the most terrifying thing that has happened to me in as long as I can remember, near-death-while-driving scares included.
Of course, as is the cliché, it all happened so fast--I'm guessing she slipped, yelled, and I screamed all within 1 second--so I have no idea if I thought she was dead or just injured before logic kicked in. I mean, logically, I've slipped on the stairs the same way many a time, as well as having legitimately fallen down the stairs a couple of times, including when I was six and tumbled head-over heels from about 2/3 of the way up, and I think I even hit my head on the railing or something (although not on the tile-over-cement floor of the basement), but even then, the worst I had was a few bruises; no concussion or anything. So, logically, the probability of her sustaining any real injury, even from falling down the stairs, is pretty small. Apparently my instincts thought otherwise, because I'm still shaken.
We see people get hurt or fall down all the time, simply because it's not an uncommon occurrence. You're walking through the school hallways, and your friend trips and lands on her behind. You sort-of laugh and say, "omigosh, are you okay?!" because you don't want to be rude by just straight-up laughing at her, but it is pretty funny because she looked just like someone in a movie in a classic trip-and-fall sequence. Secretly, you're actually instinctually worried, which is also why you laugh--to convince yourself that it's not serious. Once you help her up and she brushes herself off, depending on how well you know her, you can really laugh, and she does too, because now you've been completely reassured that she's completely okay, and now it's just funny. The point, though, is that we SEE people falling all the time. When you see someone fall, you know they're probably okay, because you have the instant visual confirmation that blood's not spurting out of a gash in their head, or their arm's not hanging off at a funny angle or whatever. Without that visual confirmation, my brain spazzed.
I think there's more to it than that, though. Because I don't think most kids older than six or so could be brought to tears by thinking their mom fell down the stairs. Inevitably, I spent the rest of the morning with nightmarish "what if?" scenarios playing on an endless reel in my head. What if my mom died? My dad? Both of them? I honestly don't think I could live without them. A lot of people probably say that, but then, people die, and thus, people's parents die, and a lot of people continue to live after having lost loved ones. How do they do it? I don't think I'd have the strength--I'm not saying I'd commit suicide, but I think if you can die of a broken heart, I would. Am I too emotionally attached to my family for an eighteen-year-old, or do other people feel this way too?
While I was at MSU in the fall, I made a group of pretty close friends in my dorm, including my roommate. My roommate was from Montana, so she was able to see her family every so often during the semester, but she told me she still missed them a lot every day. The other girls in our group were all from the East Coast, like me, and while one of them is close to her family, the other two are somewhat estranged from theirs. One girl had been sent to military school during high school, and her parents knew very little about her life--she was keeping her 20-something year old boyfriend a secret from them, not to mention her drug and alcohol habits. The other lost her dad a number of years ago, and though she gets along with her mom, they're not particularly close. Her grandparents "disapprove" of her, and I don't think they talk. The other girl from the East Coast who is close to her family lost her grandmother near the end of the semester and had to fly home on short notice, and my roommate was dealing with some long-distance relationship issues with a guy in her home town. Through all of this, I guess you could say my relationships were the most intact of anyone in our group; I was the only one who didn't have to deal, at some point, with strained relations or losing a loved one. Yet I was the one who cried every day for two weeks in November because I missed my mommy. Is it unhealthy to be that attached to your family? What am I going to do when my parents eventually get old and pass away, assuming they don't die early from some freak accident? Now that I'm home, I literally find myself missing my mom while she's away at work for the day; I just want to be a little kid again so I can climb into her arms and have her tell me that everything's going to be okay.
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