May 10, 2020

The conversation that was 40 years in the making

Happy mothers day!

This is my mother. She is my hero. I admire her more than any person on this planet.  She lost her hearing when she was 14 years old. She was a single mother to my older brother at 19. She lost her husband to cancer at 49 (the age I am now) with two young daughters to raise by herself. Through all of this, she has persevered with courage, poise, faith and love.

For a long time, my mother and I have had what I considered a strained relationship, we didn’t have the closeness I felt she had with my sister. I made assumptions about her and she made assumptions about me, but because of a mouse, forty years later my mother and I were finally able to put our assumptions to rest and get to know each other.

Let me provide some context first. When my father died of cancer, I was nine years old. My mother relied on me to help her take care of my father’s affairs. There was a lot of responsibility placed on me at such a young age, but my mother didn’t have anyone she could really trust to rely on. Growing up I was the responsible one and my sister (who is 2 years younger) got to be a child. I interpreted this as my mother loving my sister more than me and I carried a resentment toward my mother for years. 

When I got older, I distanced myself from my mother and my sister took on more  responsibility for my mother’s care which seemed to make their relationship even closer from my point of view. I struggled with alcohol addiction and became even more resentful and distant. At age 40, I got sober, let go of my resentments and focused on building a better relationship with my mother.

During this time, things were getting better between me and my mother, but I still felt that there wasn’t the closeness I desired.

Fast forward to February 15, 2020. My mom saw a mouse in her apartment and had to wait a few days before someone could come to her apartment to exterminate. Naturally, she didn’t want to stay at her place. Usually my mother would stay at my sister’s place, but my sister was ill so my mother couldn’t stay with her. My mom reluctantly asked me if she could stay at my place. I say reluctantly because my mother didn’t want to inconvenience me. This would be the very first time my mother had ever stayed with me, so I didn’t blame her for being reluctant.

After a few store runs to get some things my mother would need for her stay, we finally settled in for the evening and started to talk. The conversation started off very light, we discussed the weather, my job, her seeing the mouse run across the floor in the middle of the night. Then I shared a conversation I had with my brother that upset me, and that opened the door to a deeper conversation. I learned her emotional and mental struggles of her losing her hearing at age 14, getting pregnant in high school and raising my brother alone while our father was in the military. She told me about her relationship with her mother, which gave me a lot of insight on our relationship. She told me what she was feeling and going through when my father died. Then she said to me “After all this time, I never thought about how you felt, I know I depended on you a lot during that time and you were only 9.”

I can’t explain how I felt in that moment. I needed to hear that. I realized she loved me, but she was going through her own emotions at that time and couldn’t see past her own pain. She saw me as strong and not needing her as much as my sister, that no matter what I was going through, I would be alright. She didn’t know I wanted or needed more from her and I never told her I did. We talked until 5 in the morning, catching each other up on our lives, filling in the blanks and addressing the assumptions we had of each other. It was the kind of conversation most people don’t get to have until their loved one is on their death bed. It was closure to our old relationship and an opening to our new one.

I am grateful to that mouse as long as it doesn’t visit my place.