Vulnerability

I was just watching this movie called "In the Land of Women", the mother in that movie gets breast cancer and they show her in the hospital with a head scarf on talking to her daughter. It brought me back to a moment in my life where I felt completely helpless...a moment I've never spoken about before.

When I was in High School, 10th or 11th grade, my mom had to have surgery...it was major surgery and she was in the hospital for a few days. I knew she was having the surgery and both she and my dad told me it was routine and okay. Ultimately she was going to be fine, but she needed this in order to be healthy. I understood and went about my life as normal, I understood the seriousness of it all but wasn't really concerned because I trusted my parents. I trusted my parents, but was not completely prepared for the moment I saw her laying in the hospital bed.
I don't know how most people feel when they see their parent/s at their most vulnerable moment, but for me it was so shocking and sickening that I didn't know if I should cry or scream.
I walked into the room and saw my mother in a way I had never seen her before, a way I never want to see her in again! She was disheveled, weak, hooked up to machines and barely able to move. I remember she had a morphine drip for the pain, which terrified me, because even then I knew morphine was not something you messed with. But how much pain could she be in if the doctors put this in her?I asked if she could become addicted, but was assured that she wasn't getting enough to cause any trouble.
We sat in the hospital for a couple of hours with her until we had to leave. I held myself together, but closed into myself, I couldn't handle the reality I saw...that someday my mother, my strong, loving, invincible mother...wasn't invincible and one day I would be in this world without her. One day she would die. It was a daunting thought and I've never been the same since that night. I had already had several traumas in my life by that point, but I think that this one opened my eyes to the world I didn't see. I think that in a lot of ways I became an adult that night. An unwilling participate in a world where my mommy wouldn't be able to protect me forever.
And still, now more than 10 years later, I'm still fighting against that ache in my heart and that memory in my head.