Photo and art source: Merlina McGovern
Sometimes I wonder about life journeys being passed down through the generations. This past Sunday, I wasn’t able to spend Mother’s Day with my own mother. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we didn’t have the time or the money to fly to visit her this year.
My mother spent most of her life living many thousands of miles away from her own mother, getting to visit her only once every few decades.
She seems to have passed that traveling bug down to me. I moved away from my parents to attend college, and I never came back home. First, I was a 1.5-hour flight away, and now I’m 2,000+ miles away.
I still call my mom multiple times a week. The connection that we continue to have, despite the miles, is a lifeline in my daily life. She teaches me how to laugh, how to be logical, and how to love my life. She has always grounded me, never holding back on her factual observations. When I was practicing piano during my childhood, while my father told me I was the greatest pianist he had ever heard, my mother would praise me, but then also tell me that she did hear all the mistakes that I made. Forever a grounding force, like I said.
This past weekend, I gave her a call, and again, I laughed at the stories she told of her forays into gardening and daily walks. She talked about how she was going to eat Indian food for Mother’s Day, sure to be an adventure for both her and my dad. I laughed with her, but I was also sad. It’s sad not to be with your mom when Mother’s Day ads blast incessantly across all of my media channels.
I remember one year, hearing my mother sobbing in her room. It was such an intimate sound, and I didn’t want to disturb her. I learned later from my father it was because her mother passed away in the Philippines. My mother was devastated because she was so far away from her.
So far away.
There are so many days that I wished that US culture was one where extended families all living together were the norm. Moving away from my parents to branch out on my own was something that I never gave a second thought to. It’s what my mother had done. It’s what my father had done. We were a family of nomads, connected to each other only by technology.
As my daughter wraps up her freshman year in high school, I’m surrounded by talk about college and the future for our children. I want my daughter to blossom into adulthood and find her own way, but I also want her to stay close to me forever.
The pandemic brought our small family so close together; I can’t help but feel that that closeness will only make the empty nest years that are fast approaching that much harder.
But I cling to my near-daily calls with my mom, and I’m currently looking forward to a trip that I’ll be taking soon to see her in person. I look forward to her warm embrace, and to the moment when she whispers, as she always does when we meet, that I will always be her baby girl.
Comments