Yesterday, my mother moved four hours away to Saratoga Springs, New York, leaving a home that I have been returning to for the past fifteen years. I had no particular attachment to the house where she lived because it was not where I grew up. In fact, I never even liked the location, preferring the Princeton environs fifteen minutes south of there. But over the years, it was where we all gathered, me, my brother and his family, my sister with her family, and the neighbors, for all those reunions after my prolonged absence overseas, for holidays, birthdays, bbq's, and this past year, my weekly (sometimes twice weekly) dinner with mom. It was where my mother would monopolize me out on the back deck, with the dogs, and we would smoke cigarettes (only when with Mom!), drink wine, and catch up with each other, re-bond, get mad or sad, gossip, and just be mother/daughter, friend, confident, jokester. Needless to say, we laughed, we cried, we loved each other so much together on that back deck.
Those times are not totally lost, but I am feeling the emptiness of change, of how things won't ever be the same again. I can't wait to join her at the new house next week and create new memories to renew both our hearts.
I guess this is a taste of my own medicine for each time that I go away and leave everyone's emotions on the precipice.
Maybe it is a taste of your own medicine, but it is the gift of your own medicine as well. People are allowed to make decisions, move, change and grow. And so you seek reconnection and renewal even more whole-heartedly. I suspect you don't take your loved ones for granted and they don't take you for granted because of these choices.
Posted by: Mahala | 12/20/2003 at 05:00 PM