I talked to my mom today.
She’s in Florida right now. A few months ago, she got a text message from a stranger who told her a story about playing in a pond in her backyard with her brothers when he was younger. He turned out to be a long-lost cousin.
He dropped by the house last summer. After about five seconds of conversation it became evident that they are very much related, even though they haven’t seen each other since they were little.
He invited my parents down for a family reunion in Florida this month. My mom won’t go anywhere without my dad, even though we’re all pretty sure that she could.
They’re all staying together in a half-million dollar house. They’re a 15 minute drive from a beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, this cousin also scored them tickets to Universal Studios.
I cannot remember my parents ever doing this kind of thing. It sounds like they’re having fun.
My dad told me that just being able to go for a walk in shorts and a t-shirt in the morning in November, and see a cactus growing in somebody’s front yard, and notice differently shaped trees, and catch the occasional glimpse of the ocean, is more than enough for him. He was walking when I called him the other day, and at one point he stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.
“Dad? What is it?”
“I’m looking at a hedge,” he said, slowly, “that is made of rosemary. A hedge made of rosemary plants.” He was quiet for a minute. “It’s taller than I am.”
I miss my dad.
He’s an introvert, like me. He needs his time away from people to recharge. Opposite end of the spectrum from my mom – when I woke up at 10 here she was still awake, because she stayed up into the wee hours of the morning talking to people she’s related to, somehow, that she’s only just meeting now.
In the last couple of days I’ve felt – I don’t know. Yesterday I kept feeling like something was wrong somewhere, like someone important was in trouble, and I kept messaging people like “how are you? Are you okay?” I told my sister this and she told me in the kindest way possible that I should check in with myself. And I – yeah.
Yep.
There is only one person in the world I can talk to when I feel like this, when I’m on the verge of something like a little child’s meltdown, and be my honest ugly horrible self, and know that I’ll still be loved afterwards.
It’s frequently messy and awful when that person lives under the same roof as me. But when I’m out here alone, in a city I’ve never heard of, and I need to talk to someone, and I am scared that if I open up to anyone else I’ll damage them or drive them away with all of the things that are hurting in my body/mind/heart right now, it’s –
it’s good to have a mother.
She’s a force of nature, my mom. She works in construction. She once met Isaac Asimov asked him if he believed in God. All of the boyfriends my little sister and I have ever had have been at least a little afraid of her. She likes to play in the dirt, and frequently grows more vegetables than a family of four could possibly eat in a year. She’s a licensed massage therapist. She used to make pottery, and it’s beautiful stuff. She was a secretary for something like 16 years and hated every moment of it, except for the part where she met my dad. She’s into alternative nutrition and eats coconut oil by the spoonful because she read that it’s good for your brain. She had us eating gluten free before it became a fad, and she’ll only buy food that’s organic and non-GMO and she sources our meat from places where she believes they had good lives, munching on grass under the sun. She makes her own chocolate and saur kraut. She always wears the same pair of overalls and muddy boots, with her hair tucked back under a ball cap. She and my father like to dance at weddings. She grew up in a house with three older brothers and is consequently tough as nails and perpetually wary. She’s a little scatter-brained, and doesn’t like to let things go in case they might one day be useful, and is usually later than she meant to be. Whenever we’re getting ready to leave the house for more than a couple days, she rushes around trying to do everything that’s been on her to-do list for weeks that somehow haven’t gotten done yet. She spends a lot of time at home, and she can talk forever, if someone is willing to listen. She swears like a trucker. She cried for days when our big orange cat went missing and didn’t come home again.
We clash in so many ways. Not just me and my mom. All of us, in all directions.
But we can also sit around the kitchen table and talk and laugh at my sister’s humor and my dad’s bad puns and cook and eat good food and watch Marvel movies in the living room on summer nights when the days are long, and sometimes we can even get our shit together enough to go camping, and sometimes they’ll dance in the kitchen, my mom and my dad, and it’s a happy and a reassuring thing to see.
This morning my mom listened to all of my unfiltered negativity and tiredness, and then told me matter-of-factly that I need to book myself a plane ticket from Boston to Rochester instead of taking a bus. She told me she’d sleep better knowing I had that ticket.
She asked me what support looks like, and then said that of course she’d help me to make sure that I have an appointment with the mental-health doctor’s office when I get home.
Even though she’s at the beach.
