She was breathing heavy. It had been silent for a stretch and then she asked me if I have any fond childhood memories. It took me by surprise, like a chess move when your opponent is not at the same skill level but makes a strategic play. I vacillated between telling her the truth and reassuring her.
To be honest, I longed for the authenticity and accuracy of the moment. I’ve come to brush off so many moments for her inability to engage and truly follow the path of an unplanned conversation. Most days I let the nonsense lead the way, relinquishing common sense for companionship.
Today she was relatively clear or hid the confusion well: she knew Easter was coming (she’s spent the last six months living in Christmas town), recognized my kid’s names, and even seemed to know Andy - though she still recommended I find a husband in nearly the same breath.
I sensed the question coming from a place of Catholic guilt. I knew it was a familiar boulder she rubbed up against still in the encroaching jungle of her mind.
As a child, we parted ways early. It was the kind of parting you expect from a teenager finding themselves and cooly leaving you behind for a sense of self. I left my mother that way at age 8 and I never returned.
It is the truth that burdens me now as my own daughter sets out on her own. It is lonely feeling I am coming to understand as she drifts further into the world. It is the connection I’ve always known deep in my heart that my mother desires, and I’ve never been able to supply.
When you’re eight and you build a chasm, you do it with a youthful exuberance that solidifies the barrier on a whole other level. I would never return home to my mother from that point on.
I too crave moments with her, I lament my loss compared to other friends, but always since, in her presence, I felt inauthentic and unwilling to assert myself. It felt irrelevant and unnecessary to push who I was; she had her own expectations of who I should be and seemed to only want me to fall in line with her demands.
There’s so much anger in that connection - I think we both hoped it would be different. Perhaps that is why I’ve felt compelled to help so much and visit the past 2 1/2 years. That, and she raised us all to do more, give more, be more than we should. We are all recovering people pleasers because of it.
Back in the moment I knew there was no sense for her to feel guilty. Who knows though, tomorrow she might wake up with the same heartbreak I tried to lay to rest today.
“It took a long time for me to be at peace with my childhood, but I am now,” I told her. I guess I was telling myself that too.
Her breathing slowed. The clarity was coming in and out. I felt like she knew she was sitting with me and we were having an important conversation. I was okay. She was okay. That was it; nothing more to make sense of.