When I was about five years old, I made my mother sign a contract dictating exactly what she had been telling me my entire life: that she would always love me and support me, no matter what. My mom is a lawyer, so from a very young age I heard her talking about contracts. I asked my mom what a contract is, and she said that it’s a way to ensure that people hold up their end of a promise. Contracts make promises legally binding obligations. So, one day in her office, I drafted my own contract and made her sign it, to make sure that she kept her promise. It seems silly now, asking my mom to sign a contract proving she loved me, but the concept of unconditional love was difficult for me to grasp. The concrete piece of paper made it more real to me. My mother loved me, and I had the piece of paper to prove it.

Then she got sick.

For nearly as long as I can remember, my mom has been ill with a serious auto-immune disease that leaves her with debilitating fatigue and painful skin lesions over most of her body. She has been on extreme doses of the steroid Prednisone for years. This has made fulfilling the obligations outlined in the contract an evermore difficult task for her. Sometimes she is bedridden for days, even weeks, at a time.

Prednisone has given my mom “roid rage”. My mom has never been a malicious person, but sometimes it seems like it with the effects of the drugs. She can explode at an instant at the tiniest things, and it always used to seem like I had to walk on egg shells around her, lest she yell at me for an hour about nothing. I remember waking her up in the evening when I was seven because I wanted tomato soup. She got extremely angry at me because “it was so hard for her to fall asleep and I woke her up and ruined it.” In the end, I had to calm her down and figure out how to make tomato soup myself. The worst part of it was that I knew my mom would never be that angry with me were it not for her disease and harsh medications. A wall of illness was starting to come between us, and I was beginning to lose access to my loving mom.

I could feel the contract slipping; she was not fulfilling her obligations. My mom has not been a conventional mother, but she has shown me that she loves me when she can. At random times, throughout my childhood, my mom reminded me not of the contract, but of the terms -- that she loved me. Occasionally, we could watch movies together and cuddle. She read to me sometimes. Sure, she couldn’t keep looking over my shoulder to make sure that I was doing my homework every night. Yes, she was often unavailable to talk about my life or to give me advice about girls or about which classes to take at school. Sometimes she could not drive me to school or take me to my doctor’s appointments because she had too many of her own appointments to deal with.

In many ways, I’ve been on my own. My dad has to work long hours, take care of my mom, drive her to doctor’s appointments, and work out the logistics of her life. Sometimes my parents have been distant and unavailable. But what they did do, they did well. After watching a TV show together in which the dad threw a ball around with his son, I asked my dad why we never did that -- for a brief time, I regretted my situation. The very next weekend, he made sure to make time to play ball with me. Even though he didn’t have that much time, he still showed me how to throw a ball, how to drive, and how to shave.

I haven’t had ordinary parents, by any means. They haven’t been able to helicopter around me, and I’ve been largely independent. Just in the past year, my mom’s situation has changed dramatically---her moods are even more erratic, and her health even worse. Recently, my dad pulled me aside and explained to me that my mom can’t tap into her supply of empathy anymore, a supply that used to be abundant. The years of dealing with this illness and the high dose steroids have taken their toll on her. Right now, it’s all my mom can do to worry about and take care of herself. But, my dad reminded me, it’s still important to empathize with her. Sometimes I just need to blindly do what she says. I listen to her without expecting her to do the same for me. The roles of the contract that I made her sign years ago have reversed. Now I unconditionally love her, too. Because that’s what unconditional love really is: empathizing and caring about someone without expecting her to actively express the same emotions in return. I don’t need a contract to tell me that my mom loves me anymore. It's just known. And even though I didn’t sign a contract binding me to a similar promise, she still knows that I will love and support her no matter what.