Selfish pricks and jubilant jabs
My mom got her first COVID-19 vaccine yesterday, and I wasn't expecting the overwhelming joy that came with it
From the moment distribution of COVID-19 vaccines began, I’ve derived so much joy from seeing photos and reading about grandparents and parents getting vaccinated. It’s been one of the many odd things to come out of the pandemic that I never would have predicted in a gazillion years, even if all the parameters and variables were presented to me for speculation, but here I am: I absolutely love learning about your loved ones being immunized.
There is a practical happiness to this, for sure. Every time someone receives a vaccine, there’s slightly less chance of spread, of pain and suffering and hurt and death; slightly less chance of small businesses being disrupted, of people losing livelihoods. But there’s an abstract happiness that goes along with it, too. There’s a sense of relief to people sharing their vaccination news, a promise that something certain (or at least approaching certainty) can be produced in the midst of mass uncertainty. The people being vaccinated and their loved ones are expressing a confidence in the future when they share the news, and right now, there are few things I crave more.
Still, when I accompanied my mom on Thursday morning to get her vaccine, I didn’t expect to be so overjoyed as I waited, as I got a text saying she was jabbed and had to wait 10 minutes before she could come out, as she walked toward the car, as she showed off the bandage on her upper arm. I was so goddamn happy about it all.
I don’t think there’s been any point over the last year in which I was overly worried about my mom. She leads a healthy lifestyle: eats well, goes on long walks multiple times a week and even does a form of circuit training that she loves to talk about. But the vaccination represented a reinforcement of her strength, a confirmation of the invincibility I ascribe to her. And as such, it was less a weight off my mind and more of an addition of lightness at a time when everything seems so heavy.
My mom was safe.
It was a selfish sense of happiness I felt. And that reminded me of a time when I felt an intensely selfish sense of sadness — also to do with my mom.
She is a breast cancer survivor, or rather, as I’ve joked with her before, a breast cancer thriver. She came through her bout — after surgery, after chemo, after radiation — with such an incredible vitality, like a soccer player who exerts as much energy celebrating their goal as actually scoring it. But when I first learned of her diagnosis, it was one of the most intensely shameful moments of my life.
My mom arranged a time over text to talk. My mom never arranges a time over text to talk, so I knew something was up.
Whenever “something was up” with my parents, the 13-year-old version of me, with constant feelings of guilt, comes out, and I assume I’m somehow about to “get into trouble” for a form of bad behaviour I didn’t even know I had committed. It doesn’t matter how old I am or how independent, I dread the idea of my parents’ disapproval. It’s weird, I know. Evangelical Christian upbringing, and all that.
Anyway, this is all to say that I had my guard up as I prepared to talk with her over the phone. But from the very first exchange of pleasantries, I could tell by the formality in her voice that this call wasn’t about me; or, at least, wasn’t supposed to be about me. She told me about the cancer, about the seriousness of it, about the likelihood of her survival.
I broke down, sobbing like a child (my regression went way past 13 into toddler territory). To be clear, though, I’m not even slightly humiliated by the actual crying. It happens to me when I’m overwhelmed and I’ve never felt particularly insecure about it. The shame in this instance is derived from why I was crying.
It had absolutely nothing to do with my wonderful mom, who had such a strong and sudden reason to be fearful and weak, who had a real need for support. It was about me. It was about the feeling that I would be left in a world without her, in a world that I didn’t know without her. I was devastated not for my mom’s sake, but for my own.
At this point, as I sobbed, she began comforting me. And that’s when the second wave of sadness hit: I grew aware of how selfishly I was reacting. I remember trying to apologize to her, and explaining how foolish I felt for needing comfort from her when she was in need of someone being strong for her, and how that was making me cry even more. I couldn’t be the least bit empathetic to my mom because I was so overwhelmed with sympathy for myself. I still feel embarrassment and remorse for that impulse.
But I’ve also since recognized that it’s probably a testament to my mom’s care for me, the manifestation of her nurture throughout my life that I could be so selfish in our relationship. It’s such a luxury to have someone like that, whose love is so dependable. While I’m still slightly haunted by that moment of intense selfishness, I’ve since grown to appreciate how it was fostered, which has only served to increase my admiration for my mom.
I know this might come across as very Buster Bluth of me, but I can only hope that if I ever have children of my own, that they develop a selfish instinct around me; that my affection is so reliable the mere possibility of its removal would feel overwhelming (even long into their adult life).
There is obviously no simple explanation for whenever our own reactions surprise us. But I tend to think it’s a credit to my mom, that I can feel so fearful of a threat to her and also be so elated by the confirmation and promise of her safety.
My mom is great, and she’s going to continue to be that way.
Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash