connections

I was chatting with Mom on the phone last night for the first time in a couple weeks (she's been in the wilds of Northern Idaho at the lake cabin and out of easy contact) and we had a little catching up to do.  And in the midst of our talk it occurred to us that it is just a month until she comes back east for her semi-annual visit.  Her last visit, May of 2009, was a particularly lovely time for us:  full of gorgeous weather, dear friends, and delicious food, but also a unique visit in which we found a balance between our relationship as mother/daughter and our relationship as pals, mates, buddies, adults, friends.

I read an article a few months ago about estrangement between parents and their grown children in this day and age in America, and how it is not nearly as uncommon as we might think.  What struck me most deeply was a description of those estrangements that seem not to come of anything in particular -- no underlying child abuse or family trauma, no irreconcilable falling out -- but seem rather to be just a quiet slipping out of each others' lives.  This broke my heart, but it also scared me a little bit:  it is generally my mother and my brother who call to catch up, not the other way around.  I am relieved that they are so good at these day to day interactions, these small ways of reaching out.  I chuckle to myself sometimes over my mother's weekly letters and my brother's quirky habit of calling me while he is out walking Milford -- these postcards and these ten minute conversations, interrupted by honking horns, defecating dog, and the requisite clean-up duty, have in their way become a mainstay of our relationship.  And then it is always time to go.

I wish sometimes that I were more like my mother and my brother, that their ease of connection came as easily to me.  It does not, though, and so I know that I am blessed to have them.  And I count myself as lucky to have the kind of relationship with my mother that leads to genuine pleasure at the realization that I will be traipsing off to Newark in a month's time to pick her up at the airport.