I miss my mom.
I apologize in advance to those of you whose mothers are not alive, because I can only imagine that the hole their absence leaves in your heart is considerably bigger than the one in mine.
But still.
My mom, along with my father and two of his siblings, headed out on a cross-Canada road trip last week that will last the better part of a month. They’re going to drive through the Rockies, visit another sibling in Meritt, British Columbia and soak up the relatively warm weather in Vancouver.
It’s not like I would be spending the better part of that month visiting her at my childhood home if she were there, it’s just I feel strangely disconcerted knowing that she isn’t.
She called a few days ago, her voice thin and crackling, on a cheap cell phone they are carrying but not leaving on. The call came at the end of a particularly stressful day for me and I longed to keep her on the line and throw all the crappy minute details of my day at her so she could catch them and make them melt away as she does with a sympathetic click of her tongue.
But I didn’t, of course, because she was only calling to say hi, to check in and to be reassured that all was right in my world before she went back to the vacation that she so deserves: I kept it brief.
Twice since then I have reached for the phone to call her and felt the realization that I couldn’t wash over me like a rebuke over a spoiled child.
All my life I have made an art form of fierce independence and so it’s strange that now, at 38 years of age, ensconced in my own home and responsible for my own family, I so crave the sound of her voice, the exchange of inanities and the ensuing calmness that her presence brings to my life.
I can’t help but wonder if one day when Graham is a grown man and beset with worries – (and he surely will be, because aren’t we all much of the time?) he will take the same comfort in my very presence. I wonder if the struggles that Rob and I now endure will bring a perverse kind of comfort to him one day, reduced, as they surely will be, to mere anecdotes about the inevitability of life’s struggles and the endurance of the human spirit.
It has been a bitter winter this year – more bitter than I’ve dared detail in this blog. It’s true that in the last few days both the literal and figurative arrival of spring has seemed imminent.
But I’m weary of the season.
And I miss my mom.
