EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.

Mom Always Had A Place In My Diary

October 29, 2025—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)
This is going to be a mind-dump—no rhythm, no order—just what's left of me spilling out because tonight my mind simply cannot hold any more. 2025 has been one of the most chaotic years of my life, and somehow, this month found a way to break through whatever was left of my limits.

I'm still in disbelief, still reliving the moments from earlier this month. The doctors called and told me to come quickly, and I did. I knew before I even picked up the phone that it would be that call—the one every child dreads, even when the child is fully grown. I remember the drive—how every mile stretched longer than it should have, how the world outside the windshield blurred between the streaks of rain and the streaks of tears I refused to acknowledge.

When I arrived, they went over everything—the tests, the X-rays, the numbers, and the prognosis that sounded more like a verdict than a sentence. End of the line. Those words still echo in my skull like static.

Mom's final wishes were simple, and brutal in their simplicity. She wanted to see me. She asked that I show up in uniform. So I did. I stood there in pressed blues, smoothing out the creases with steady hands that didn't feel like mine, pretending composure while the rest of me came undone somewhere deep inside. I smiled for her. I held her hand. And on the way there, I cried the entire drive—quiet, shaking, alone in the place that raised me.

I'm forever stuck on the last things people tell me. The words always linger—the final looks, the half-smiles, the small talk that turns out to be the last talk. They stay until they're overwritten by the next round of last moments, each one layering over the other until all I'm left with is an archive of goodbyes. Mom and I talked all day. She drifted through time like she was trying to hand me back the whole story at once—my birth, the doctors telling her I'd be different, my days at Buckle My Shoe, then Friends Seminary, and finally the move from New York City to Stamford when I was in third grade. Each memory surfaced and settled between us, soft and deliberate, like she was tucking me in one last time. The most important detail that she revealed was that the moment I was born, the doctors told her I was a girl.

Earlier this year, amisdt the stress of moms declining health, and my need to sell my old house in New York City, Amelia temporarily relocated to Erie, Pennsylvania. I found myself hopping trains again, and somehow, just as I wanted, I caught a random one—ending up at Grand Central like the universe had sidetracked me there because it no longer knew what else to do with me. Not long after blending into the crowd, I paid the subway fare hoped the A train back to 14th street, signed the documents, and sold the house I grew up in. Mom and I talked about all the people who once filled that space—those who believed in me, who saw something worth saving—and how most of them are gone now, far too soon. As mom and I talked about the past, the doctors came and went like the bank men earlier this year—paper in hand, eyes down, doing their jobs before leaving behind the same empty quiet.

I noticed how her expression shifted when we touched on leaving the city—how her eyes softened in that quiet, knowing way. She could see it in me, the shadow that era left behind. Those years still carry their weight; the loneliness of small-town adolescence, the silence that followed the hum of New York. So, we stuck to the bright parts instead—the kites we flew behind the GE plant in Schenectady, the weekend trips to visit Dad's best friend, the man I always called Arturo. She summarized that chapter the way only a mother could, skipping the pain, distilling it all into one clean line: "No matter what, even though you were the kid everyone doubted, you still made it—and I am unbelievably proud of you."

She finally admitted that my father was an abusive asshole. Then we talked about selling my childhood home, and the strange kind of freedom that followed.

Mom told me I could do anything I wanted now—that after everything I've been through, and after finally reaching a point where money isn't the barrier it used to be, the world was wide open. Then she asked what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It wasn't the first time she'd asked. She'd asked when I was eight, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a notebook full of dreams I never finished writing down. She asked again when I was twelve, and then during my senior year of high school—the year I ran away and never went back. She asked through every version of my adulthood too, like a refrain that never lost its shape no matter how many times my life did.

Every time, my answer was the same: I didn't know. I still don't. But that's the strange beauty of it. Not knowing is what's kept my life interesting—unmapped, unpredictable, stubbornly alive. It's the uncertainty that's carried me this far, the same way a compass still points North even when you're not sure where home is. Somehow, through all of it, a little seed of hope stayed in the ground—it hit me: somehow, Amelia and I made it through together.

I thanked her for being my friend first, and my mom second, then I rose from my chair, stood up straight at the foot of moms hospital bed, and gave her a salute. The same salute I'd given to those I once called my co-workers, though in the end like mom, they were family. There's no ending to write tonight. Just this hollow kind of silence that feels like waiting for something that's already happened.