My mother's shoes

They were brown hard leather with intricate holes, dirty and turned up at the toes with the wrinkled crease broken in across the top of the shoe. Black footprints melted into the inside where my moms feet were always dirty and she didn't were socks, she ran around barefoot a majority of the time a throw back to her days of poverty growing up in West Virginia. Those aren't the shoes I'm walking in now. It's my depression to her bipolar. I spent four days in the same hospital unit as her. She was always able to come home with her life intact, my father took care of her. Took her to the hospital, brought her clothes to wear, allowed me to visit. I had no visitors, no clothes not even a pair of underwear to change into. I remember being heavily sedated, bare butt in a hospital gown, eating breakfast and lunch at the table in the middle of the unit. The food was cold and bland and I was a zombie, oblivious to my lack of clothes in public. I have never gone without underwear in public a day in my life. That's not the worst, I wish my lack of underwear was my rock bottom. Not even the top ten. Instead of going through the laundry list of what happened to me, I wonder how my mother dealt with it. I never once wondered that before. Before I made rude jokes about how bad could it be to in a psych unit, I joked that's where all the good drugs are. No, that's where lives can end if your not careful. Being over sedated, my head felt like it was wrapped in bubble wrap. Under water, where every thing is muffled and you can't speak. All the words are gone. Is that why she hated going, getting lost inside your mind, no words, no map, no trail of crumbs to your old life. When she came home what was it really like? I remember the house had to be cleaned, dinner had to be made, she got to come home to a comfortable home. What was life like outside of our house? Did rumors fall like rain about the details of her hospital stay? Tall tales and exaggerated stories of oh my lawd did you know what that woman did? Was she publicly shamed, water cooler gossip, lied about or was anyone kind to her?