I talk to my mom at least once a day. My peers (not to mention my partner!) think it’s a bit excessive. But I live far away, and I miss and love her dearly, counting her among my closest friends. Which isn’t quite what you’d expect, given the excruciating disintegration of what used to be our family. My list of grievances – with the way I was raised, and the way I wasn’t raised, more to the point – is long, indeed.For years, I had been resentful, angry, dismissive, and contemptuous: she and my father had messed up, and I never missed an opportunity to tell them so. “I’m glad she’s not my daughter,” said a friend of the family upon publication of my first novel, in which the main character eviscerates her neglectful, clueless family. My mother was apoplectic.
She always said that I’d understand how she felt about me when I had my own children, and I always rolled my eyes.
A few weeks after my son was born – days as full of elation and fear and tears and laughter and difficulty and amazement and apprehension as any I’ve ever experienced – I called her. She loved me this much? She had held and fed and bathed and dressed and cooed at me like this? She had felt my pain as her own? She had put all of herself into my wellbeing?
“I’m so sorry, Mom.”
She laughed. “I’ve been waiting years for this!”
Elisa Albert is the author of “The Book of Dahlia” and the editor of the forthcoming anthology, “Freud’s Blind Spot: Writers on Siblings.” www.elisaalbert.com
