What Does it Mean to be a Mother and Who Decides?
My mother passed away after a long, excruciating decline ten years ago and I still avoid sidewalk cracks as if my life depended on it, because for a time, it sure felt like it did.
“Step on a crack and you break your mother’s back” was a childhood rhyme we taunted one another with old-timey style and it directly formed the basis of my lifelong avoidance of not just sidewalk cracks but any split in the pavement.
When these sing-songy words first bored into my cranium, I had no idea it would echo in there for a lifetime, trapped, contained, going nowhere. The idea of my mother’s poor back being broken because of my Hush Puppies felt like a very real peril, one that kept me always scanning the playground pavement and sidewalks for cracks. Even if a significant part of me recognized that it was irrational, just a collection of words that rhymed in a memorable way, I wasn’t taking any chances. Not only did I love my mother and not want anything harmful to happen to her, my father, the parent who would remain in the event of this cruel prophecy coming true, was not safe. All these years later — my mother having long succumbed to Lewy Body dementia, her spine curved and painful with arthritis but not broken by an errant step of mine — the childhood superstition still holds me in its grip.
