While my mother and I generally get along really well, that’s not always the case. We’ll have our fights about her vision of who I should be, what I should be doing, how she thinks I reflect on her, and all of those other things mothers and daughters have fought about since the beginning of time.
We had one of those fights earlier this week. You know them. The kind where you vow to hang up and never call again because it’s just not worth the aggravation and you are thirtysomething years old and don’t have to take being treated like that.
Well, I did call again, and she confessed that she’d been feeling ill, and I immediately knew that meant she wasn’t sleeping. When my mother doesn’t sleep, she gets cranky and mean, and she imagines all kinds of things. She imagines my retirement, my future illnesses, whether or not I eat enough, whether her grandchildren will be okay without her.
I suppose I can understand her neuroses. If I was up for seven extra hours a night with nothing to do but worry about all of the people who’ll be left behind when I’m not here anymore, I might wake up feeling kind of bossy.
Fortunately, my mom came around to understanding her fear, too. She saw some friends and commiserated with them about getting older and losing sleep over all manner of “tonterías.” It made her feel better and, although I was the one who called her back, she did manage to give me her version of an apology. She told me about how happy I make her and how her friends told her that as they’ve gotten older they’ve gotten mean and crabby and irrational and often say things they don’t mean. She didn’t have to say more and I didn’t make her.
© Laura Genao 2007
Lo Que Dijeron