Being close to her daughter(s) is probably one of the best relationships a woman can have.
My mother and I rarely lived on the same continent and for most of our lives we were thousands of miles apart and a phone call every now and again for Christmas and birthdays barely scraped the surface and certainly wasn’t of the BFF’edness I have with my daughters.
My youngest is my favorite traveling companion, she’s good to take shopping, she’s a sport when it comes to pub crawling in London she randomly Skypes in the middle of the day and is great fun to stand about in the kitchen with drinking lattes and eating leftovers while talking about our day.
My oldest is the game player and enjoys everything from monopoly to Yatzy, to card games and dominoes, she’ll join me on a walk, care for me when I’m sick, watch animated movies that make us cry, call me on her way home from work, text me at lunch and come home for holidays and vacations to be spoiled and fed.
It doesn’t matter if they live under the same roof, or are high kicking it on the high seas we are always connected. Of all the people they can call and check in with during precious Wifi moments in a European port or a break from potty training at an early learning centre, I am always number one on the call list…or so I am made to feel!
Whether touring around town dropping off teen girls at their after school activities, or off on a weekend trip, taking a jazzercise class or on an expressway in a traffic jam, I get calls and texts, photos and lol comments, whoo-hoos about grades or customer satisfaction and moans about period cramps.
You get the picture!
Constant connection, little blips to remind me they are thinking of Mum!
Sooooo….
When there was virtual silence for two weeks from my chatty youngest after she’d gone to visit her boyfriend and things hadn’t gone smoothly and she’d said to me,
“I won’t be going there again.”
I began to grow worried,
“Is it something I’ve done?” I texted.
“No!” she re-texted. I began to grow anxious.
“What then?” I per-texted.
“Nothing! I just need to work this out for myself.”
I couldn’t budge her!
My imagination started running wild.
Work what out?
And to top it all her message stream dried up.
A month later we all met up for Easter lunch as a family,
and unexpectedly a dreadful realisation dawned on me, one I couldn’t bring myself to broach in front of everyone else.
I gasped inside my head and my imagination began going berserk.
I was heartbroken that she would keep such a thing from me and I began checking my calendar and our past texts to make sense of some dates.
I’d bought her a Diva cup and scrolled through her one-liner texts,
“Totally rocking this Diva cup!
“Why had we never known about these before?
“I’m going to put it all over Facebook!
“Wow!!”
That was four weeks ago!
I looked at her recent text,
“I won’t be going there again.” shouted at me to pay attention.
No more mention of the diva cup…
No mention of anything.
My mind was doing flips!
Then,
“Loving this non-alcoholic beer,” raced across my screen, unsolicited.
My heart started racing and I almost picked up the phone to talk but thought better of it. If she wants me to know, she’ll tell me…and if she doesn’t want me to know…
…she’ll avoid the subject,
…go dead,
or send me cryptic messages!
“Wanna come to work with me today?” buzzed my messages.
She picked me up and as we were on our way to her first stop and I just couldn’t stop myself,
“Why have you been so different?” I asked her.
“I’m different? You’re different!”
“How am I? Specifically?” I asked.
“You’re just into your own things, flying by the seat of your pants…”
She must be referring to our move into an apartment and the hunt for acreage and a new home. I was tongue tied so shrugged instead.
“…Well, maybe it was me projecting that onto you… Maybe it is me who is different…” she trailed off.
“You know what?” I started, “here’s what your silence said to me…
“That you were pregnant and deciding to hide it from me until you got it straightened out with your boyfriend.”
“What?” she said, almost swerving off the road! “You’d be the first person I’d tell.” She righted the steering wheel and returned her eyes to the road. “Really Mum?”
Whew!
“I thought perhaps you’d decided not to burden us…” I ventured.
Of course I should have remembered who she was, the diva of all divas…totally living up to the cup of the same name.
She would have wanted all the attention; and needed to share all the misery and invited us to join her pity party, 100%!!
“Listen,” I continued, “to how I drew my conclusions. You announced you weren’t going to see your boyfriend again and I thought he’d thrown some kind of hissy fit at your announcement. Then you talked about wanting to work things out by yourself and you started drinking non-alcoholic beer. You didn’t mention cramping or diva cups and all I could think about was how many weeks it had been and how quickly can I get her down the aisle and married… before you started showing!”
She was veering off the road again howling with laughter!
“Muuum! I just wanted to work out my life on my own, I knew my boyfriend and I would be all right and I didn’t want to be talking about our problem and then having to turn around a few days later and say everything was fine…it’s embarrassing when I do that!”
“Please, do me a favor, straighten up and drive straight…”
She eased back into the traffic.
“And don’t go silent on me again…God knows what I’ll imagine next!”
“ROFL!!” she texted!
“Don’t text and drive!” I said, “I’m right here!”
Mums, stop making mountains out of molehills…they’re not good for your health!