When I Started to Care

My Mother was one of those people that were never content with life, yet was always striving to better life for the ones she loved. She worked sixteen or eighteen hours a day just to have an extra day on the weekend for me and my brother instead of going into work Saturday like she was contracted to do so. We didn't realize it at the time but she was unbelievably good to us. She started getting sick. I remember her getting sick, going to the hospital and doctors only to send her to work the next day but she was still sick. My first relization of just how sick she was happened when I was in her charge for the week. I was spending the weekend at my friend's place in the suburb south of where we lived. My mother had fainted from loss of oxygen to the brain when she got up from sitting at hte computer working. She'd fallen and hit her head on the way down. Half of her face was swollen from where her head hit the corner of the desk... Meanwhile it was still Saturday and I was having fun at a friend's place, completely ooblivious to what was going on. I had forgotten to charge my pone and as a result I never heard from home. Sunday came and it was about midday when I asked to borrow their home phone since my battery was dead. I dialled home and my brother answered the phone, obviously distressed. He told me to come home as soon as possible but wouldn't mention what was wrong other than that I needed to come home right away because it was an emergency. I told my friend and his family what I knew and they took me home right then and there. When I'd made the ten minute journey which seemed like hours. My brother answered the door and looked as if he'd seen a ghost. By which time my heart was racing, anxiously wanting to know what was going on. Then he immediately took me to my mother and had shown me what had happened. When I saw her bruised and swollen face my jaw dropped...I was speechless, mortified that I wasn't there when it had happened. I didn't know what I could have done to help or prevent it. I was angry with myself not only for not being there, also for my family not being able to contact me. I felt so helpless, I just wished I was there no matter how much my mother told me there was nothing I could have done at the time. It made me grip the idea tighter in my own mind. Just not being there was enough to run a whirlpool of emotions through my head that were inconcieveable at the time. Let alone not hearing about it until the day after. It was then I truly started looking out and caring for my mother even though it may have been subconciously until the years to come.