My mother called me on my birthday. While in ordinary life this may not seem like anything to be worried or feel awkward about, to me, ten days later, thinking about it still gives me a stomach-ache. It was the slight pleading in her voice that bothered me so much. I love you and I miss you, baby.
What do you love, though, and what do you miss. When I left I was very small. When I returned to you five years later, you were making potato salad and I desperately wanted you to notice how much I had done and where I was. Now it is almost another five years past that, and earlier this year I swore that I would never be the first to contact you again. I don't know what to do.
I have one more day off on my vacation. Today I will register the puppy (where are those papers, again?) and get some cleaning done.
I look more and more like my mother every day. She appears most forcefully in flashes, when the lights turn on or off, in transitions, days where I feel that I'm ready to conquer the world. She also comes out when I'm feeling indescribably down, because that is one of the ways that I most see her as, that I remember clearly.
I miss her, for reasons that I understand intellectually but abhor emotionally. It is now that I am quilting together the rituals and rituals and habits that will follow me throughout all of the things I Feel That I Must Do In My Life that I really feel like I could use the words that a mother gives to her child. I'm not even asking for them to be important, but I'd like them to have more weight than 'can I call you sometime next week?'
I'd like to quit waiting for the phone to ring as I was promised. I want to know stories about when I was small, about the places my parents went when she was near bursting with me, about grandfatherly faces and tiny shoes. Maybe I can blame this sudden desire on all of the newborn little ones that are suddenly an amazingly new force in my life.
My sister will be in an airport on Christmas Eve. The thought of this saddens me to the bottom of my feet. I miss her already and it is only November! She begins her many holiday journeys next month.
I'm not getting a tree, either. I do not feel it enough to make the effort.
If this year's x-mas even is going to be sister-less, I might as well go without. Not to mention that Apollo eats anything he can wrap his little teeth around (tin foil, bluetooth headsets, science fiction book sets) and I do not even want to deal with pine needles in his little dog tummy.
