She was sixty-five and she had the flu and she called to tell me she was sorry.
Not about the flu. She was sorry about the inconvenience of the flu. She was sorry about what it meant for the people who needed her to not have the flu. Her partner’s drive. Her grandchildren’s Christmas. The part-time job at the shop that had not said directly but implied through the particular way that some employers imply things that her sick days were a problem, that her body was not entitled to need what it needed without consequence.
She was apologizing for being sick.
I heard it on the phone and something in me went quiet in a particular way, the way you go quiet when you recognize something, when you are listening to someone else and hearing yourself from the outside for the first time. I have done this. I have lain in beds where I should have been resting and instead made lists of what the being-in-bed was costing everyone else. I have turned my illness into an accounting. I have treated my body’s needs as a debt I was running up against everyone around me.
My mother learned this before me. She learned it from women before her who learned it from the world that told them their worth was the work they produced and the care they gave and the smoothness with which the household ran, and illness interrupted all of that, illness said I need something now, illness was selfish in a way a woman was not supposed to be.
I said: Mum. Stop. You are sick. You are allowed to be sick. You do not have to apologize for having a body that needs things.
She said: I know, I know. I just feel bad.
I know she knows. That is the thing about these lessons. You can know them and still not be free of them. You can understand that your worth is not your utility and still feel, in your chest, the guilt of the body that has stopped producing. The knowing and the feeling are not the same country. Moving between them takes a long time. Some women never fully make the crossing.
I wanted to tell her: you have worked every day of your adult life. You are sixty-five and you have a fever and the only thing you should be doing is lying on the couch under a blanket watching whatever you want and letting someone bring you soup if someone is willing to bring it, and if no one brings it, ordering it, and if you cannot order it, I will drive it, I will drive two hours and bring it myself. You do not have to have earned it. You just have to need it. That is enough.
I am not sure she heard me.
I am not sure I have fully heard myself.
