My mother lied to me. That’s the truth. She said she was fine; but she lied to me, her only daughter. My mom was the person that no matter what happened, no matter how hard I needed to push myself to succeed, and no matter how far I fell, she would always be there to pick me up and love me more than anyone. My mom was the one I could go to for anything, and she would always tell me the truth: how she felt about my friends, how to solve any problem I was ever faced with, and how to just simply be myself, the real Sarah Rea. But when my mom got sick, she said she was fine, no matter how horrible her days became. I knew she had something much more serious wrong with her than a weird stomach bug. I had never in my fourteen years of life seen anyone sicker in any hospital bed -- the person I thought would be in my life forever, my superwoman. Even when my mom didn’t have the strength to get up for a simple family dinner, she told me she was okay.
What’s worse than having your mom lie to you, the person who had told you never to tell a lie ever since you could talk, was that she lied about lying to her only daughter. She would sugar coat everything just to make it seem like nothing was wrong with her. She would lie about what she ate, making it sound like she had eaten and entire fisherman’s platter, when really she hadn’t even eaten 500 calories in a full day. She did this for months; my mother lied to me, her only daughter, but I can’t say I blame her. No one wants to face the fact that her days may be numbered and no one knows what category to put her under; whether to tell you that your mom will be all better in a month, she could be treated in a few years, or that maybe she will die tomorrow. And superwoman can’t bear to stand the idea that she is trapped like a ghost in this world of hope. Needles and doctors have broken her bones, but her words she told me, those lies I trusted, shall forever hurt me.
I finally came to the conclusion that I would trust nothing my once protector of all evils told me, everything she said I decided was a lie. Of course she would tell me of all the good news the doctors would tell her before so cleverly drowning in baker’s sugar the bad news that I expected with every trip to the jail cells they call hospitals. Cancer and the sweet smell of fresh raspberries now began to be used in the same sentence. It killed me a thousand times over that my mom had to be stuck in a hospital bed on the chlorsterphobic oncology floors, but why would no one see how much it hurt me that she lied to me? She’s all I’ve ever needed in life and to have her slipping away from me was like having my heart ripped out as it was beating a million times a minute.
But hope was the one thing that we had. Faking or not my superwoman managed to hide her fear to make sure her oldest child, the one she lied to, could still salvage her young years that were now being stolen from her. We have gone through days of near death, and some days of pure joy through this year from hell. But with every day we find that our skies are now falling and somehow we have to put the pieces back together. Somewhere up there in that crumbling above, I know there are angels looking out for us. If there weren’t, this demon of a disease would have already taken my mother from me. I would be the girl who lost her mother to cancer, rather the girl with the superhero mom using every last ounce she has to fight back every single day against this mysterious monster. So no matter the lies that I’ve been told, my mom will always be my own superwoman for never giving up and making the best of everyday.
Lies have broken my spirit, but superwoman will never let radiation rays and chemo drugs destroy her soul.