Like a Moth to a Flame

Mother Tongue is a magazine that interrogates what it means to be a mother in the 21st century, and this story packs an incredibly powerful punch. Reporting from a children’s cancer ward, it offers an honest and intensely human view of the women (and one man) who find themselves struggling to hold their lives together while the doctors and nurses work to save their children.

Francesca bought crystals online – jagged shards of purple amethyst, green malachite and pink tourmaline that she swore had magical powers. Maggie ran 12 miles a day but subsisted on saltines from the snack closet. Brittany smoked weed behind the hospital dumpster with Tony from housekeeping. Kara was a cutter. Susie stole Wet n Wild nail polish from CVS. There was drinking, pills and cocaine – because you couldn’t sleep anyway. And me? I was having an affair with my bandmate, Joe, sneaking away to his guitar-filled basement apartment in Hoboken every chance I got.

Sometimes it felt like we were all clichéd archetypes pulled from the pages of Girl, Interrupted: the laminated ID bracelets, the constant squabbling in the halls, the sense that we’d been institutionalized against our will. But we hadn’t been committed – we were Cancer Moms. And faced with our children’s mortality, we’d taken refuge in our darkest, basest desires.

I first met Francesca at the coffee cart. Her serene, heart-shaped face and gold crucifix reminded me of a Renaissance maiden, though her mouth was all Brooklyn. “What kinda cancer ya’ kid got?” she asked, offering me some Coffee Mate. “Brain tumor,” I answered, and then I burst into tears. She took my hand, slipping a small red rock into my palm. “Carnelian,” she said. “Hold it when ya’ scared.”

Francesca and I were both moms of twins, juggling one child in the hospital and one at home with our husbands – and a revolving cast of well-meaning friends and family we nonetheless had to micromanage from our phones. Between blood draws and reaching for the pink puke bucket, I’d send texts like, “Hi Mom, can u thank Nadia for the lasagna? Also lmk how it goes with the HVAC guy. And can Dad or someone deal with Aunt Phyllis, she thinks if she gives to the GoFundMe the Russians will steal her identity, lol thanks!”

My sons, Lou and West, had just turned one. I barely knew them, let alone how to save Lou’s life. “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle,” Francesca liked to remind us. “Then we must be some badass mother-fuckers!” Brittany chimed in, before heading out for another smoke.

I wasn’t sure if I was a badass motherfucker or just a fucked-up mother. In the surreal weeks leading up to Lou’s diagnosis, I had started texting Joe again. My husband, Ian, was passing out drunk on the couch, leaving me to care for an increasingly listless, hysterical Lou and a feverish, teething West. I wish I could blame my affair with Joe on sleep deprivation, or say that it was a one-time thing. But this unspoken dynamic had been going on for years.

As long as I had Joe, I didn’t have to deal with the fact that I was married to an alcoholic, albeit one I loved and now had children with. Ian didn’t have to get sober or confront the ways I felt abandoned by his drinking. And Joe – older, sober and a ’90s slacker type, whom I also loved – never had to truly commit. The empty mini bottles of Ketel One vodka I was once again finding in Ian’s briefcase felt like permission. I relied on them as much as he did.

I tried to clean this all up before becoming a mother – let alone a Cancer Mom – but dysfunction keeps a clock all its own. The only way I knew how to cope was by disappearing into the rock-n-roll cocoon of Joe’s futon bed, the now-stretched skin of my stomach falling onto his giant body like a discarded animal hide. Holding onto him, I could still hold onto the dozens of shows we’d played together – even that awful night in Austin a couple years back, when I realized that 2012 was going to be Sharon Van Etten’s year and probably never mine.

I was pretty sure all of the above caused Lou’s cancer. As there was no reason for Lou to be born with a deadly brain tumor, I found one within myself. He came from my unruly body, after all.

While becoming a Cancer Mom was a next-level nightmare, it also offered redemption. It was as if the hospital staff knew we blamed ourselves for our kids’ diagnoses. Maybe they also knew about the dumpster fires we’d left at home, or the bullshit we were up to when no one was looking. Was this whole ordeal some kind of penance for wayward mothers?

First, we relinquished our names. Once admitted, we were referred to solely as Mom. Of course, we were beyond grateful to the doctors and nurses for keeping our kids alive. But losing our names felt like the final blow, a cruel consolation prize for having lost control over our children – for being mothers in name only. Maggie always responded, “My name is Maggie!” when the faceless, Oz-like voice called into her room from the intercom, “Can I help you, Mom?”

We were Alexa, Francesca, Maggie, Kara, Brittany, Susie – and Brian, the one dad among us. According to Kara, who eavesdropped on all of our FaceTimes, Brian’s wife “couldn’t handle it.” “She’s not a real mother,” Francesca texted me from next door. But we were all obsessed with this absent woman who got to keep her name, even if we didn’t know what to call her.

Despite the Do Not Disturb sign I made in the Arts and Crafts Room, I couldn’t sleep when Lou slept, as suggested by Tracy, the spray-tanned night nurse who seemed to glow in the light of the monitors. Jolted awake by the constant beeps, the checking of vitals, the intercom – and my full-body anxiety – I’d stay up and Google things, like the spiritual properties of Francesca’s crystal (carnelian: energy, courage, creativity), Sharon Van Etten or even my own name, just to confirm I was real, that I still existed.

I was pretty sure Francesca was right, that the rough, pointy rock gave me magical powers; namely, the ability to leave my body. Like the night Lou pulled the chemo lines from his chest and all the alarms went off. As Tracy raced in, pushing me aside, I squeezed the crystal so hard it sliced through my latex glove, cutting my hand. Francesca and the others appeared in the doorway. At a total loss for words, I showed them my bloody palm. “It’s like the stigmata!” Francesca joked, and Maggie crossed herself.

Lou only knew a handful of words, like mama and milky. He had no way of telling me what he needed, or how he felt (although surely he had pulled his lines in protest). Nor had I any way of explaining to him, or West at home, what exactly was going on.

In many ways, I, too, felt pre-language. Other than with Francesca and the others, I couldn’t share how I really felt, nor did it seem to be encouraged by the staff, my friends or family. I felt ashamed for wanting anything beyond Lou’s survival, so I played the part, collecting everyone’s praise – their admiration of my accidental martyrdom – like little medals.

The outside world, in my now-limited interaction with it, also reinforced this messaging. “You’re so strong!” friends wrote on our MealTrain wall, alongside instructions for heating up lasagna. “I don’t know how you do it!” others marveled on my Instagram feed – where I only shared smiling selfies and updates. Most days, muzzled and exhausted, I didn’t know how I was doing it, either. Since much of pediatric cancer treatment happens inpatient – behind closed doors, in HEPA-filtered, air-pressured rooms, in plastic gowns, gloves and masks – everyone else was spared the worst of it.

Francesca would cover for me so I could meet Joe down by the river, as it was getting increasingly hard for me to get to Hoboken. Sometimes we’d sit in silence and watch the lights flicker from Brooklyn, where I used to perform, in metallic mini dresses I still owned but would never fit into again. Disappearing into Joe’s coat, I’d tell him about the others – how Susie only swiped makeup from CVS, never Walgreens. And how she kept her loot in the safe in her room. Sort of like how I was keeping Joe.

While I desperately wanted to go home, I wasn’t entirely comfortable leaving Ian alone at the hospital with Lou, since he tended to stop at the bar on the way. “Poor guy,” Tracy said. “Can you blame him?” But I did blame him. I blamed Tracy, and the doctors and all of them! I didn’t understand why the dads were allowed to live their suffering out loud, while we mothers were expected to keep ours locked up out of sight.

The screensaver on Francesca’s iPhone was Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, though a crack in the glass split the Virgin Mary in two – a perfect, not-at-all subtle depiction of the Madonna-whore complex I was living in. Surely a whore couldn’t take care of a child with cancer – but I did.

It would take me many years to acknowledge that, despite his drinking and our estrangement, Ian showed up the only way he knew how, too.

None of us mothers stayed in touch, not even me and Francesca. For a while we had a Badass Motherfucker text thread, but then Susie went silent. It was one thing to be a Cancer Mom – but what do you call a mother who has lost a child? Susie’s exit, into the ring of hell the rest of us had narrowly escaped, broke the hold. One by one we ghosted each other, as I’d ghost Joe when Ian eventually got sober. People act in inexplicable ways when they’re scared.

Recently, at the clinic for Lou’s routine scans, I recognized a mother by her running clothes, though they no longer hung off her once-skeletal frame. In fact, she looked as alive as her daughter, as healthy as Lou. “Who’s that lady, Mama?” Lou asked. For a second, I couldn’t find words. I stretched out my hand – my once-bloody palm – and said, “Her name is Maggie.”

Mother Tongue is a biannual print magazine that interrogates (and celebrates) modern motherhood through inclusive stories about art, sex, pop culture, politics, food and a few things in between.

Alexa Wilding is a writer, musician, and teacher based in New York’s Hudson Valley. A former singer-songwriter (“the neo–Stevie Nicks” – The New York Times), she holds an MFA from The Writer’s Foundry in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has most recently appeared in Suleika Jaouad's The Isolation Journals and The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for An Inspired Life, as well as Mother Tongue and Cup of Jo. Her newsletter, Resilience, reached Substack’s Top 100 Rising Culture.

Irena Zablotska is a Ukrainian illustrator based in London and a Camberwell MA graduate. She creates bold, character-focused work and emotional, often whimsical illustrations with a dash of raw, intuitive energy. You can see more of her work on Instagram.