She has blonde highlights to mask her grey hair. I have blonde highlights to mask my red hair. She’s pale with a few freckles. I’m pale with lots of freckles. She lives in long sundresses, while I thrive in short shorts and tank tops. She walks around in pretty jewelled sandals. I run around in pink Jibbitz-ed Crocs. She hates sushi, but I love it. I hate mushrooms; she loves them.
She hates ultra-processed foods. Whenever she catches me gobbling down a pack of salted classic Lays, she snatches the bag from me, drags me to the garbage under the sink, and makes me watch as she dumps out every last potato chip until the bag is empty. All the while she lectures me on how “UPFs cause cancer.” I roll my eyes and laugh at her.
“Well, yeah, Mama almost died,” my sister says casually. I’m sitting, knees to my chest, my back against the brown pillows on the brown couch. We’re in my living room, waiting for my mom to come home from work. I turn off my phone and drop it onto my thighs. Blood rushes into my face, and my heart begins to beat faster and faster.
“What are you talking about?” I say in an aggressive tone. How dare my sister spread some nonsense like that? She never thinks before speaking; she is so insensitive. “They caught it early, didn’t they?”
Everything comes back to me. I see my mom, after she loses her hair, trying to cover up her baldness with a scarf that came free with a box of makeup and skincare products. I see her struggling to put it on so that it looks good and somehow matches her outfit. This is after she tries to wear a wig and breaks down because—though it is blonde—it doesn’t look like her real hair, and it itches her head.
“No.” My sister pauses. “Margarita, she was in stage four, they caught it late.”
Tears form in my eyes, and my head starts to spin. My mom could have died. I could be without my mom today.
I see her in the hospital bed alone, struggling to breathe, pressing the red emergency nurse button, unable to scream for help because she had some bad reaction to the chemo medicine. I see the fear in her eyes as she tells my dad what happened while I finish setting the table for dinner, carefully placing the napkins and forks.
I see the stacks of large plastic containers filling our fridge, each containing a meal one of our neighbours made for our family. They tended to be comfort meals like lasagna, meat sauce, and spaghetti. I remember thinking how cool it was that we got this free food; sort of like a schoolteacher around Christmas getting boxes and boxes of chocolates. My mom would get meals, gift baskets, baked goods, chocolates, you name it.
I was nine when she had cancer. At the time, I didn’t really understand what it was. I just knew that my mom was more tired and needed to spend more time in bed, even in the summer, even if it was sunny out. I remember running into her room, in my shorts and pink t-shirt, asking her to come to the park with me, only for her to say, “Not today, Babous, I’m a little tired, but could you bring me a glass of water?” I remember being annoyed but still running down the stairs and back up to bring it to her before going to play.
She had put me in day camp that summer so that I wouldn’t have to see her sick. Westmount Camp made an exception for my family and let us book all eight weeks because they knew what was going on.
The front door creaks open as my mom waltzes through, still in her long, bright orange winter coat, the coat that I don’t let her wear in public when she is with me. She asks my brother for a glass of wine as she slips off her coat and hangs it up on the wooden post at the end of the stairs. She scans the room and takes a seat next to me on the brown couch. I look at her, my eyes filling up with tears. Her face melts at the sight of me. “What’s wrong?”
For the first time, I ask my mom about her cancer.
My mom hugs me as I cry into her chest. “Babous, that’s how I wanted it to be.” I sit
back up on the brown couch and wipe my tears. “I wanted you to have a fun summer and to be a kid. I didn’t want you to have to deal with all of that.”
I say, “I know, but what if—”
She cuts me off. “There’s no what-ifs. I’m here now. The worst happened, and I survived.” She smiles and pulls me into her chest again.
My mom had cancer. I didn’t. She banned UPFs from the household, and I try to ban them from my diet. Her hair grew back, and mine grew longer. Her hair turned grey. My hair stayed red.
Margarita is a commerce student finishing up her last year of Marianopolis, planning to start at McGill Desautels in the fall. When Margarita isn’t on a run or at a yoga class, she enjoys studying with friends at her local Starbucks. In the summer, she loves taking long walks which typically end with getting froyo.