What would Mom do?

My mother's standard advice -- her answer to everything -- is to get some rest. If she had her way, the ills of the world, the Middle Eastern conflict, the pains of hunger and the lack of faith would be solved by a hot beverage and a recliner. \nUnder normal circumstances, she would be right -- even a genius. How many times did I believe that influenza, rhinovirus or a sinus infection would kill me, only to find that a day in a Lazy Boy would recoup my losses?\nI cruised into the Thanksgiving holiday doing my darndest to do what she would do. I cooked a turkey, baked cookies and slept. I saw my doctor, who told me to rest. \nThere is a wall I've hit; much like falling asleep at the wheel of a car, it took me by surprise. It is the barrier of a disease that doesn't act like flu or cold, but feels like both. It comes with surprise as its element of choice. A sudden surge of water, a Nor'easter in NYC, a Plains snowstorm -- it's like all of these. It leaves one cold and feeling vulnerable to the elements.\nIn the process of test counseling, I met a person who is in the process of moving to Bloomington, in love with someone who lives here. The fact that the proposed love is positive and the proposed lover is negative was a pleasant surprise. Well, maybe that's not the way to put it -- it was a blip on my radar. The relationship-to-be would have, built in, some of the same parameters my relationship with Chuck has -- an admission of certain barriers to be overcome by love and devotion. \nMy mother is a mujahedeen for love, a woman who believes in its inexplicable power so much that she will countenance some shadiness to see it achieved. Because of my sexuality, it's her greatest fear that I will live alone, die alone and never be surrounded by it. My parents both see it as the apex of achievement, the singular mark of success. Their attitude toward my achievement of it has been flummoxed by the gay thing and then the HIV thing -- my possibilities took two body slams in the smackdown of life. \nI am my parents' child, even as a test counselor, even as a person with AIDS. I talked about the road ahead with my test subject. I talked about my life briefly and the proposed relationship a lot. I spoke with all the conviction of three years experience in dealing with a negative partner, the fright of sudden illness, the erection-dwindling reality of transmission. \nI met the proposed love when the results of the test were back. A person of great charm, doubtlessly easy to fall in love with, a former New Yorker (I always like people who have lived there). The three of us chatted, got the results and decided to get together some time for dinner. It isn't the typical result of a test session for HIV, but neither is their situation. \nWe talked about the HIV flu, a disease undetectable in any Physician's Desk Reference. It has no locus of symptoms, and can't be described with the dull uncertainties of weather forecasting. It is a description known only to people with HIV. The pain in joints, the back that feels like it has hauled stone, the stomach a finicky partner. \nIt is the type of problem that mothers dread -- one for which chicken soup, hot tea and love have no answer. The solid force of mother love cannot dent it. \nDoctors don't like it, either. The chart of an HIV positive patient would look like mine -- patient complains of fatigue, painful joints, upset eating patterns. Temperature is normal; blood pressure is normal, no outward signs. Like my mother, my doctor says rest and hot beverage. And unlike my mother, he can order blood tests. \nWhat would mom do? Well, if she's my mother, she would persevere, and so have I. By baking a turkey and cookies, I participated in the legendary status of my people to go stubbornly against what their body tells them to do. The apocryphal story my mother tells is of her own mother, a woman I never met. On her last day of life, she states admiringly, her mother got up out of bed and washed the baseboards of the rooms in the house. She wasn't about to die in a dirty house. \nAs I looked at the indifferent conditions of the baseboards in my house, I felt the stirrings of a call to action. Over two days I cleaned, vacuumed, dusted, bleached and Windexed. I made stabbing motions at the floors, determined to control my environment. I castigated my uncooperative body to do, do, do! Like Mussolini's trains, I needed an outward sign of control, proof. Something that eludes us, every one of us, in the telling of this story. \nToday, as I wrote this column, my coffee resurfaced into the world. Suddenly, no warning but the hyperactivity of my saliva glands, a rumble unworthy of a volcano -- then I was fine. I drove Chuck to school and called the city to complain about my neighbor's trash. I test counseled, I helped some undergraduates with a semester project. I washed the baseboards in my life, if not my house --I've gained nothing on my ancestors.\nMy mother looks for proof and so do I; we look for reasons in the well of superstition and home remedies. Antecedent weaknesses that would explain the present, if by nothing more than poorly understood genetics. We believe in science, but we believe in the body more. And although our faiths are fervent, our devotions regular, we have never learned the language of the body. We cannot translate pain to inaction; rather, it's a rallying cry: if you can't reach understanding, try reaching for the Pine-Sol. My mother's mother would be so proud.