Rebecca Fishman Writing 111 Professor Case 5 March 2013 Eyes like a Mirror The time was 5:09am,

the date June 18th, 2007. My family planned a trip to Israel to commemorate my bat mitzvah, despite my arguments to go to Japan, and the taxi came at 5:00am. Yet my mother and father remained in their room, my brother and I waiting by the luggage downstairs. Lost in a bottle of booze, my mother hid behind a drunken face. She screamed slurred swears as he pulled her out of bed, letting her stumble to her feet. She wobbled down the stairs, passing us children and making her way to the taxi outside of our suburban home. We stared at her retreating form and grabbed the luggage after moments of morning silence, pulling the oversized bags down the drive way, until my father relieved us from our duty. Slipping onto the cool taxi seat, my brother and I huddled into the corner, using the darkness as a wall. Only her alcohol ridden breath penetrated our fortress, poisoning the air as we fell asleep on the taxi door. I remember wishing that we werent going anywhere, or at least left her at home. In her drunken stupor she claimed to wish the same, so why drag her along? But thinking the same as her scared me silent. The words refused to leave my mouth as I stared at the shell of a woman that I called my mother. Long ago, I began to believe that she murdered herself with the poison she ingests on a daily basis. Cuddled in the corner, a similar question invaded my mindis my real mother hidden inside of this drunk, or was that thought right? No answer came as my mind drifted to darkness with the rise of the morning sun.

I refused to eat hummus when we got to Israel; I complained about sleeping with the Bedouins; I rolled my eyes to my mothers face with every conversation. She retreated back into her bottle by day two, and I could not have been more reposed. No more could be expected from a woman who got drunk on her own daughters birthday, a woman who passed out at swim meets and showed up at practices drunk, expecting her children to willingly get into a 1996 Honda Odyssey after she nearly ran over a family of five. So when she poured only enough poison down her throat to keep her wobbly but functional, my only reaction was to sigh and stay silent as our family drove to the next destination: the Tabun Cave. We spent most of the sunlit hours inside the chimney-like cavern, exploring its depths, until the slowly setting sun dimmed, and we climbed back to the visitor center. The last few steps were arduous for my mother, which I shook off as a combination of her drinking and smoking habits. I led my brother to the van, my parents trailing behind us as I hazily looked ahead. There was a loud thud, an unfamiliar scream and dozens of whispers. They penetrated my ears and I swirled around, but soon dulled to my numbed senses. The pavement was stained with my mothers body. She writhed on the man-made ground, her eyes wide as if she was a wild animal. My father held her head above the cement and pinned down her arms even though she lashed at him, her legs kicking at some nonexistent foe. I stared. And stared. Then stared some more. After the eternity a minute seemed to be, my trance was broken by our tour guide. Hey, lets get some ice cream! He grabbed my arm and pulled me away, my eyes locked on her thrashing body as it became smaller and smaller to my straining eyes. I dont recall the kind of ice cream he got for me, how it tasted, or the color of the shops walls. My only thought at that point was the image of my mothers blonde mop sprawled on the

cement, her blue eyes as wild as the sea. Her face scarred my every vision so much so that the trip itself is but a blur in my memory. When we returned home, my mother was sober. She went to see a doctor, and found that she has what is called an elongated qt, which was explained to me as having an irregular heartbeat. She was prescribed a heart medication to take every day, which would suppress her suicidal heartas long as she remembered to take it each morning without fail. Next time, she wouldnt be so lucky. Next time, she would die. As a freshman in college six years later, I call my mother once, if not twice, a day. Although she endangered my life and her own with many alcoholic blunders, my mother taught me that all life is sacred; I cannot forgive when I had to call 911 due to her alcohol poisoning, how we had the same conversation every Friday because she blacked out so often, or how she pretended that she had no problem, even though she admitted it before. But she is still my mother. Despite her addiction, she will always be my mother. When she laid on pavement, dying from the failures of her own heart, I simply wished for her safety, even though she was both mentally and physically ill. My hatred for her very being eroded with the threat on her life, allowing me to remember when she would play Pokmon with me at the age of five, when she fought with my father to move because my room was the size of her bathroom, when dressed me up as Madeline and danced to the shows songs with me, as well as so much more. Although she drank, although she smoked, she still made my sandwiches for lunch every morning, and she still told me that she loved me. My bat mitzvah itself was nothing to me. Studying the Torah was second nature after ten years of Hebrew and regular schooling; reading and writing were simply everyday tasks to a veteran student. The ceremony was merely an oral test, making sure that I recalled the lines of

scripture, tunes of prayers and the meaning behind their various words. After the traditional rite of passage, I was no more a woman than before. Rather, I was a girl, a preteen whose head was filled with the burning fires of hatred and the written word. Never before had I realized that my mother will die, that her damaged body may not stand the stress of a heart counting down the beats to her death. Who knows what day may be her last, or even my own? Life is fragile, and so every individual should be cherished. The smile brought to my mothers face with each phone callso big that I can hear it through the phonereminds me of this every day. Trust is a mirror. When you break it, you can glue the pieces together, but you will always see the cracks. And after a while, the shards of glass are so small that you cant glue them back together any longer. The mirror my mother and I shared was cracked; each piece stomped into little dust until there was more glue than shards. Our reflections stared back only where the mirror was still visible, letting an eye shine through, and maybe a finger or two. But when your mother becomes a dying animal on the pavement, the cuts obtained by regluing the pieces become only scars on your fingertips, a distant memory in the face of that image reflecting off of the strongest mirror of allyour eyes.