Chapter 25 Mama Knows Best

The sun shone through the window the next morning which was a rare occasion in Seattle. Instead of focusing on the weather Derek chose to observe his wife's last minute of sleep before he had to drive to work. She looked peaceful and let out a loud snore, which kind of amazed him every time he heard it in the morning, even though it caused him to stay awake some night. "Morning" Derek said with a huge smile on his face as he saw his wife's eyes move for the first time this morning, which meant that she was about to wake up. She lay flat on her belly when she looked at him and asked him "Were you watching me sleep? "
Derek cuddled her and said "Maybe"
"What are you, some kind of weirdo who watches women sleep?" Meredith joked as she turned around to get up. She was wearing her old Dartmouth sweater but she couldn't look more beautiful.
"Maybe" Derek smirked.
"You realize I'm still mad at you? At least a little bit" she wondered as their eyes met.
"Are you?" Derek asked kissing her neck.
"I am." Meredith said with a smile on her face.
"I know a way to make you feel better" he said passionately kissing her neck.
"Don't Derek, it's a beautiful day to save lives, and all of this, you have to get to the hospital" Meredith mocked him.

It was her day off so Meredith decided to study for her intern test, make an appointment with her therapist and to go through a few of her mother's boxes with personal items to see which ones she was going to keep. Studying for the test was easy for Meredith. Her mom had discussed medical procedures at the breakfast table before she was able to read and Meredith felt like she had a natural talent for learning off symptoms and treatment methods. She didn't feel prepared for her intern test though. Her mom had told her that she didn't have what it took to be a surgeon and after one year of residency and countless sleepless nights she wasn't too sure if her mother was wrong. She had personal issues and she wasn't able to set them aside to focus on what was most important at the minute. She took a sip from her cup and continued to study for the test.
Around noon she had looked through two boxes with childhood memories when she found one of her mother's journals in the box. The journals usually contained mostly surgical notes and no personal information or thoughts, but today she came across a journal that contained a lot of private thoughts and seemed to be very personal to her mother as she had kept it with Meredith's childhood memories rather than with all the other journals. It contained the notes about the so called "Grey Method" for which her mother had received her first Harper-Avery nomination, but what really caught Meredith's eye was a note that was dated with September 1983, which was a few months after they had moved to Boston. Meredith didn't remember a lot about this time, in her memory it was all a big blur. She knew she had started going to elementary school that summer, but aside from her first day at school and the new house in Boston there wasn't anything she was able to recall. Everything she could remember was a red sea of blood, which didn't make too much sense to her. Her mother had started working at a new hospital and she got to see how little different one hospital gallery looked from the other, how little the working hours varied from one hospital to the other and how little her mother's life had changed after moving to the other side of the coast.

"-Boston, 23rd September 1983-
The cards we are dealt are the cards we have to play with. If you don't like them, you have no choice but to put on a smile and keep playing. You cannot throw them away and leave to improve your chances in the game. In surgery we have to operate on the patient in front of us and deal with the complications that are thrown at us, we can't choose our patients. Surgeons like to think they are in control; we like to think we are in control when we are standing at this operating table, but we are not. A surgery can fail for any number of reasons, whether from a patient's morbidity or surgeon's ineptitude. Once the mistake is made, once the complication arises, there's no going back, but by the time you close up the patient you better made sure you dealt with your mistakes and his. Unfortunately in life mistakes are not as easy to correct as in surgery, at least for me. Whenever I see my daughter in the gallery my heart breaks. How different would her life be if the cards I had been dealt were different or if I had decided to play them in another way? She's a strong child, a bright child and I can't help but wonder what she's going to achieve in her life despite the fact that I know I open her up every morning and leave bleeders when I close her up every night. I just can't get the suture to hold. But I know she's a fighter and she's going to survive nonetheless."

'What is this supposed to mean?' Meredith wondered. Did her mother compare screwing up Meredith's life with making the same mistake in surgery all over again? It was the first time she had found anything personal in the journal and she wondered why she came across now. She was preparing for the most important test since finishing med school and she was trying to make a marriage work. She never thought her mom had doubts about the way she had brought up her daughter. She had spent most holidays in Boston at the hospital. At some stage she helped the nurses bring meals to the patients or helped to keep the patients' files updated and her mother never seemed to see anything wrong about this. When she was ten her mother got her a suture kit and she a few months later her sutures were better than the sutures of all interns at the hospital. As she read on she could feel intense amounts of self doubt in her mother's words and it was a feeling she never thought her mother had. The Ellis Grey she remembered from that time was a woman who put her career first and did everything to advance her career, who was confident and strong. The surgeon Ellis Grey was everything she wasn't. To her Ellis Grey was a strong confident woman who loved her career more than her daughter. She wondered whether Ellis could have offered her any advice on her situation right now. 'Was it okay to have a little self doubt after all?' Meredith wondered thinking about her relationship with Derek and his hesitation to tell his family about their nuptials. Was she leaving bleeders every night? Was she a fighter?

When Derek came in after work in the evening he smiled at her and told her "I called my mother and I told her about us" She hadn't expected this after their fight last night so she was caught off guard and asked him "So what did she say?" in a very matter of fact tone. Had she been worrying about nothing?
"She wants to meet you and she was glad I called" Derek said.
"and she hates that I got married to you the day we met" Meredith added voicing her biggest concern.
"My mom doesn't judge people before she meets them, so you're safe until then. But I'm sure she's going to like you, Mer. Don't worry about it. And she has seen our wedding pictures and said you looked nice, so I wouldn't worry about it" Derek tried to calm her down.
"You showed her our wedding pictures, which I haven't seen yet by the way and you tell me I shouldn't be worried? Last time we talked about them you told me I puked when we took them." Meredith laughed.
"I didn't send those to her, relax. But she said that she was going to fly to Seattle to visit me and Mark and to get to know you." Derek explained to her.
"Dr. Sloan is staying in Seattle? I thought he and Addison really hit it off and he was going back to New York." Meredith wondered as the plastic surgeon had been on leave for the past week.
"Well, I couldn't tell you anything about it, that's what my mother told me. You should call him Mark, though, he's my best friend. My mother said that he and Addison would fly to Seattle tomorrow, that's all I know. So you're not freaking out that she's going to come? You seem awfully calm" Derek asked her.
"In fact I am freaking out about it. I appear to be calm because I thought about the three fastest routes to the airport and where I was going to fly to." Meredith chuckled.
"So where are you going to fly to?" Derek said with a huge grin in his face.
"First I thought Vegas because it kind of did the trick last time, but then I thought everything that happened in Vegas was what got me into that mess in the first place, so I picked DeMoines." Meredith explained.
"Why DeMoines?" Derek wondered.
"Because no sane person would go there looking for me. It's too dull and boring." Meredith told him with and started to laugh from all her heart. It was a genuine laugh and he was intrigued by the glow on her face.
"I see you have it all planned out." He chuckled.
Meredith smiled and the expression on her face changed. "But then I thought: I don't have to be dark and twisty anymore, from now on I'm going to be bright and shiny. So I'm going to embrace the moment, put on a smile and say hello when your mom arrives. Because I'm bright and shiny Meredith, and other people like bright and shiny Meredith." His wife told him. It sounded like she was trying to persuade herself rather than him.
"You are serious? Do you want to calm me down, try to persuade me you're not going to run?" Derek asked suspiciously.
"I do. But I really have to go now; don't want to be late for my night shift." She said holding the car keys. She was going to work the night shift and he'd be sleeping in her bed on his own. "…and Derek, don't be mad, but I'm not ready to introduce you to Thatcher and his folks yet. I need time to get to know them on my own and after that happened; you can get to know them."

Meredith and Cristina met in the intern locker room. Cristina was getting ready to go home while Meredith had a night shift ahead of her "My mother said raising me felt like making the same mistake in surgery over and over again." Meredith said looking at Cristina "She was a brilliant surgeon and she said I'm the reason she's a failure"
"You're mother is dead, Mer." Cristina said.
"I know that. I read one of the journals she wrote when I was 5. She wrote that she felt bad about the way she was raising me. Why didn't she ever tell me?" Meredith explained.
"Because one of the first things you learn here is to never admit your mistakes in front of your patients." Cristina told her "You remember the heart you punctured with your gloves? It almost got you fired."
"I couldn't have sued her though" Meredith closed her locker walked away. "And telling me I was bright and strong wouldn't have been a bad thing. She could have told me she loved me, instead she told me I was ordinary."
"Meredith, I would have loved to be brought up by your mom." Cristina told her as their ways parted for the night.