Shades of Limelight

9: Renegade

"Life is a funny thing, Layla. You can think that you have it all together, that you have everything right where you want it, and then suddenly, everything you know gets pulled out like a rug from underneath you," Mom told me when I made my usual pit stop at home to make sure she had everything she needed to make the next day as easy as possible.

I wasn't quite sure what she meant by that, whether she was talking about the divorce, the MS, or something else, but it certainly seemed true to me.

"And it's also not fair to convince yourself that you've got it worse than anyone else," she continued.

"I don't do that. I'm working on an article about a girl who survived an attempted drugging and rape, so I know she's got it much worse than I do," I said.

"I was talking about Brooke," she said.

With Brooke at a sleepover for the night, I couldn't imagine that she had any idea what I had to do to keep our little family together. I had an internship lined up at one of the bigger newspapers in Madison, and since that didn't pay for medication or food or anything else, I didn't have the means to take it. Ryan struggled to understand that, and even though I never told him the full story (or any of the story at all, really), it really wasn't difficult to comprehend that not everyone had an infinite supply of money so they could work for nothing. It may have seemed out of character for someone as serious as me, but life was a funny thing.

Was that going to cost me in the future? Yes, and I knew that. But what choice did I have with a mother unable to work the way she wanted and needed?

"Well, I do have a lot more on my plate than her," I said. "It's not worse, but it's more."

"And she's an eighth grader," Mom replied.

Of course, when I was in eighth grade, Mom was in perfect health, but that was one tiny thing I had going for me over Brooke.

"Now that I've said what I needed to say to get you thinking, how are you feeling?" Mom asked.

I wasn't sure how much she wanted me to think or feel, so I just shrugged. "I don't know. I'm just trying to keep myself busy, and there's always something happening, which is both a good and bad thing, I guess."

"It's not healthy to be too busy to really deal with what's bothering you," Mom said. "Trust me, I have the opposite problem. When I want to do something, that's exactly when my vision and legs don't want to cooperate with me."

That certainly wasn't the case for me, since I had just made time to tell Isabel what I thought about her turning my misfortune into a story, but there was truth to everything she said usually, so I kept that advice in mind for the future.

***

I was a Wisconsin girl, born and raised. Ever since I was a little kid, I had known that I was going to end up at the University of Wisconsin for whatever I decided my ultimate goal would be, whether that was being a nurse, a journalist, or an astronaut (which, unfortunately for me, there was no four-year astronaut program at the school). And it was a good thing I had decided that home was really home, because when Mom began to struggle without any apparent reason, I had to be close to help her with emergencies and everyday life.

We later found out that there was a reason: lesions on the brain causing multiple sclerosis.

By this point, Dad had a whole new family that he loved, and he certainly couldn't be bothered to do anything to help his old children and ex-wife, so that left me to handle everything. I didn't mind that responsibility for the most part, but maybe it was taking a toll on me, especially now that Brooke thought I was a selfish idiot for not taking a future of enough money when it was standing right in front of me.