My mother slips her hand into mine as we walk toward the elevator in silence. Tears slide down my face, hidden under my mask. My ten-year-old son and I are flying back home, only I don’t want to leave. At eighty-four, my mother has had her first stroke. It’s hard to figure her out again. While the stroke was not physically debilitating, it scrambled far too many files on her hard drive and erased that many more. Words she once knew disappear at random.

I do not know where my fierce and loquacious mother went. Sometimes she sounds much too young, like my son, using short sentences with minimal emotion. Other times, she stops mid-thought, searching for words her mind can no longer retrieve. It leaves me speechless. My dad does most of the talking now. It is a total role reversal and bittersweet. I gained my dad in one way and lost my mom in another.

And then, as if she can sense my doubt, she sing-songs her usual, “I love you, honey bun,” and a rush of relief washes over me. For a moment, I have my mother back.

I do not want this stroke to be the last chapter in our seemingly incongruous relationship. My mother and I have always been different. She is to the compass rose like I am to a good meander. Practical and methodical to haphazard and forgetful. Absolute to…well, not so sure. I believe there are many ways to do anything, to work, to pray, to be in the world. My mom is certain of one way. Up against her singular approach, I am often wrong, or so it seemed.

When I was young, I followed her lead. I upheld the rules of our faith, righteously admonishing my friends for taking the Lord’s name in vain. I played mass more than I played school. I quieted the creative voice in my head, the one that spun stories all day long, in favor of earning the straight A’s in school that were expected of me. Day after day, I pushed down all the wonderings I felt inside, the artistic, not-so-sure parts of myself, telling no one about them, just as I had been taught.

But our differences surfaced in my early adult years as I started to shed some of those absolutes and make my own decisions. My twenty-two-year-old life did not mirror my mother’s. I did not get married after graduating from college, as expected and as my brothers did. I did not want to iron any future husband’s pajamas as my mother had done early in her marriage. I did not want to start a family. I wanted to find my own way and my own voice again.

That desire often put a wedge between us and the closeness I still longed for. Most of my friends called their moms every day. They seemed to have a bond, a connection that had escaped us.

A decade later, when I was still single and before my son and I adopted each other, my mother and I decided to try something new and take a weekend trip together every year. It was our attempt to reconnect and see the country. I boarded that first plane with a sense of impending dread that, over the years, transformed into anticipation. Red rock canyons in the southwest, giant oaks in Savannah, jazz clubs in New Orleans. We watched the sun rise from a hot air balloon. Spent an afternoon driving back and forth across covered bridges. Hiked in national parks filled with brilliant fall colors, towering rock formations, and alligators hidden along muddy shores.

Once in a complete panic, as wild turkeys thrashed through the woods and headed straight for our trail, I yelled at my mother: “We have to go back.” I instinctively grabbed her hand. But she just laughed and kept her cool. “They are just turkeys,” she said as they rushed past us, unphased by our presence.

I learned a lot about my mom on our yearly trips. Her first love, not my dad. Her brother Charles, whom she never met. Her closest friend, who died much too soon. I also discovered the artist she was in her younger years and those parts of herself that seemed the most like me that she kept tucked away. I’d grown up looking at her oil paintings. They framed the fireplace in our living room and hung over the rocking chair in her bedroom. She rarely spoke about them. The most I knew was that she had taken classes with a neighbor before she became a mother of four. I assumed she had long since given up on her art. But I never asked why.

All those years later, sitting together at dinner in Sedona, a glass of red wine and our traditional crème brulée for dessert, my mother opened up. She told me how free she felt when she painted, how the demands on her as a wife and mother disappeared for a while. She told me about a time when an instructor’s critique had stopped her cold and how she’d reworked that watercolor tree line for months, only hearing the bite of his words. She said she saw an artist in me. Suddenly, the differences that had defined us began to bleed together. For the first time in our mother-daughter relationship, I was looking into a world beyond motherhood and beyond all my doubts about if—and how—we fit together. I put my spoon down, leaving the crème brulée untouched, hoping to make the moment last. I had never felt so seen.

Less than a month before her stroke, my mother called to tell me that she was going to write the story of her brother. “I am the only one still living who knows it,” she said, her voice catching. An essay I had published about my grandmother and unsung mothers—birthmothers all over the world who place their child(ren) in the arms of another family to raise—had stirred something in her. I didn’t know what exactly, but as her daughter of fifty-two years, I could not have been prouder. Finally, I thought.

For more than seven decades, my mother has carried her brother’s story inside, revealing it only in its entirety to my father and a priest she trusted in her early twenties. Her parents had told her younger sisters that Charles had died. But my mother knew otherwise, and she held onto that secret no matter how alone and guarded it made her. She told no one of the shame and anger that flooded her when the few relatives who did know what had happened insinuated that her parents had “thrown Charles away.” At thirteen, she vowed to protect her parents. Defend them. Not allow anyone to hurt them in his name again.

Her baby brother, the uncle I never met, was born with Down Syndrome. By virtue of state law in 1952, he was placed into state custody at birth to ensure his care for the duration of his life. My grandparents had survived the Great Depression with an eighth-grade education. They had very little means, and if they were to bring him home, even for a short visit, the state would rescind all medical, educational, and financial support. My grandparents only wanted what was best for him.

My mother only wanted to hold her baby brother in her arms, to sing softly to him, to look into his eyes and be his big sister.

At eighty-four, my mother set out to tell his story. Group homes for adults with disabilities. His job working in a box factory. His love for cowboy hats. His struggles with how to manage living on his own. Some of the stories she gleaned from annual reports over the years. Others from her mom and dad. She even shared a chance encounter she had as a young nurse-in-training when she saw a boy in a hospital room, who in her heart, she believed to be him.

There were also the random attempts by her extended family to meet Charles and bring him to see my grandparents. Misguided and insensitive, at best. My mother genuinely feared it would kill her father. She wrote of how her parents used to visit Charles when he was a little boy and how he did not know or understand who they were. It crushed them. Eventually, like many birthparents, they allowed Charles to have his life, separate from theirs. The doctor’s prognosis was that he would only live to be seven-years-old. Charles died at sixty-one. My grandparents carried their lament silently to their graves.

Page upon page poured out of my mother and eventually appeared in all our inboxes; my siblings and their grown children, all my cousins and their adult children too. I called my mom after I read it, not sure what to expect. His story had shaped the contours of her life, her buried grief driving her choices. Mine too. How many times had I been told to hold something inside, to not tell the truth about our family?

“How do you feel now?” I asked.

“Good,” she said. “Lighter.” She paused, her voice growing tender. “I felt so close to him as I was writing it. Almost like he was in the room with me.” I exhaled, feeling privileged once again to see into my mother’s world. I could feel her smile soften. “I knew I could tell you that part because I knew you would understand,” she added. “Not everyone does.”

I lingered there before asking, “Mommy, do you think Charles is trying to tell you that you can lay it down now. That perhaps he doesn’t need you to carry this anymore?”

“Oh,” she said softly. “I hadn’t thought of it like that. But I guess you are right…I can let it go now.”

That was the last deep conversation my mother and I had before her stroke. It was over in less than three minutes, but I hold it close these days. I remember walking out on my front porch afterward and crying. I cried for Charles, for my son, for all that they lost and all that they gained. I cried for my mom and her parents and birthparents all over the world. But mostly I cried because my mother had let me in again. Sitting there, under a bright harvest moon, I knew how deeply we belonged to each other.

Tonight, we play Uno over Zoom. My mother chuckles as my son happily gives her yet another Draw Two. I can hear my dad whisper audibly when it’s her turn next. She hasn’t recovered all the words she lost, but I can see the progress she is making in therapy. Sometimes she confuses Skip for Reverse or the color blue for the color red. But it seems less jarring to me now. I offer a suggestion, and she grabs the word she needs and keeps going.

I wish I knew what this new chapter holds for my mom. And for me, as well. But after all those years of dissecting our differences, her stroke is teaching me to lean into what binds us together. What endures. I’m starting to trust that our connection will make itself known again. Spoken or unspoken, it is always there. I know that now. And even though miles keep us apart, I like to remember the slip of my mother’s hand in mine, like we are both back in those woods with nothing to fear, not even wild turkeys.

-Karen Skalitzky

Karen Skalitzky is a writer and mother. She currently serves as a communications director for a national education nonprofit. A former educator and coach, she has over twenty years of transforming underperforming schools into the kinds of schools all children deserve. She loves books of all kinds and reading with kids of all ages. She lives in Chicago with her son.