It's In the Arms

In my family, as in most of America, the women do the carrying. All the things that weigh heavy in a life are bound up in our arms.

My Grandma Norma was a librarian in Cincinnati who carried my mom through her tender years in a one-bedroom apartment following a marriage annulment in the 1950s. A single working mother in an age where opportunities were legally limited, she also carried books—wobble-wheeled carts piled high and endless heavy stacks in her arms, back when words needed paper to survive. I picture her in neat blouses and long swaying skirts, her dark hair echoing the waves, as she walked the aisles of wooden-shelved rooms that housed "Invisible Man," "The Feminine Mystique," and the Pentagon Papers from the New York Times.

At some point, probably in her middle years, her body declared war on itself: rheumatoid arthritis. The joints of her limbs grew warm, swollen, and reluctant. Angry synovial membranes in her fingers and elbows bound tendons to scar tissue like monsters to bad dreams. Her movement was restricted, her pain day-long. Her right elbow—the one she needed in order to stamp due date cards in the backs of books and hug my mother back in their tiny apartment—was especially painful.

Years of constant inflammation ate at the smooth ends of Grandma Norma's joints like a beaver destroying a tree trunk. Her fingers froze into gnarled bent claws; useable, barely. But her elbow became bony blocks of dying tissue and cells that threatened infection or death. Excruciating pain haunted every small arm movement. In the '60s and early '70s, good options for joint replacement were few.

My grandmother chose a surgery that removed the bone ends at her elbow. Doctors did not implant an artificial replacement. Instead she was left with a flail joint—a complete loss of voluntary motion. The procedure stopped progression of the disease and the worst of her pain, but she could only bend her right arm by lifting her forearm with her left hand.

Perhaps that's why she retired from the library at the age of 50, according to the obituary we found months after her death. Perhaps the pain she lived with for decades like an unwanted boarder was one of the reasons she and my mother were mostly estranged during the last decade of Grandma's 78 years.

What I remember most of her is the soft folds of her face, her hands like cruel wooden carvings, and the way she had to pick up her arm to put it on the table to write. She could no longer carry more than a few pounds of life at a time.

They say a daughter inherits her mother's suffering. When I was in second grade, my mom's right arm started to ache. She was holding the worries of a family of four who had moved halfway across the country, landed in a recession, and never righted itself. She carried our blood-flecked laundry, our food-stamp groceries, and the fraying ends of a rope that never met no matter how hard she pulled.

At one of the many jobs my increasingly unreliable dad briefly held, he found three abandoned puppies in a cardboard box on a busy street—scruffy flop-eared things that looked part golden retriever and part desperation. When he brought home the box, my mom carried them, too.

Our overgrown yard was not fenced, so she erected a temporary solution with some metal posts and chicken wire. Alone, like she had to tackle most laborious efforts, she wove stakes through the squares and pounded them into the sun-packed soil with a heavy rubber mallet. Days later, still achy and stiff, she thought she had hurt her hand or wrist. She got a metal-lined splint that stretched from metacarpals to mid-forearm and rendered writing nearly impossible. One day I was feeling sick and stayed home from school; she wrote my absence excuse to Miss Mason so illegibly that she included a second note which began, "Megan did not write this—I have injured my hand..."

But it stubbornly refused to feel better. Instead, the pain spread toward her shoulder like poison ivy up a struggling tree. By the time we lost that home to foreclosure and moved to a different house, one without heat or air conditioning, she also carried my debilitating anxiety attacks as well as a wet dish towel draped across the back of her neck to ease the sweltering summers. The longer she was made to hold things, the heavier they became.

The third house had heating and cooling but brought more instability and explosive family arguments. She started carrying my deepening depression, my brother's school truancy, my father's instability, and the tall stack of past-due bills that towered on the table. By then both of her arms ached like orphans under the weight of so much dysfunction.

I think it was the fourth house where my mother was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Biochemical changes in her muscles, such as those caused by injury and prolonged profound stress, were riding neurons to her brain which correctly interpreted pain. From there, everything got muddled and went sideways. Long after it should have calmed, her nervous system was still lighting up like Times Square and setting off misfired signals to the spindly nerves in the fibers of her fingers, her arms, her elbows and shoulders. Pain was a river that raged constantly across her upper body, leaving her head barely above water.

In the 1990s, no FDA-approved medications existed to treat fibromyalgia pain. Instead, she walked out of the tri-county medical center carrying off-label Elavil, Flexaril, and Lyrica in plain paper bags. On our shelves at home, the pills cozied up to her antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. Some dulled the pain but made her cotton-headed, some helped cast off fatigue but made her manic. None made her whole. She carried those deep unrelenting aches like she carried the dissolution of her marriage, her inability to keep any job, and the crushing acceptance that she could no longer provide for me.

When I think of her, I want to remember her smiling slightly, standing at the kitchen counter with a bowl of Special K cereal in her tender hands. But usually I see her at the end of her 56 years, bone-thin and sick-sallow, stooped at the shoulders and beneath the eyes, unable to lift a gallon jug of milk. Even eight pounds was too much life to carry anymore.

They say a daughter inherits generations of shadows, the pain carried by her mother and her mother's mother. They say these anguished legacies of gender rolls, financial dependence, caretaking, and longtime yearning roll like liquid mercury through years. Tiny splashes land on our arms and faces as we raise them to the sky in search of silver linings over and over. We absorb them without knowing why or how to stop.

Three months ago, my right arm started to hurt.