I love my mom. I love my son.My mother lives in a local senior housing apartment. She is happier now than I've ever known her to be at any other time of her life. As she will point out to you, if you visit with her long enough, her biggest disappointment in life is that her son doesn't visit with her often enough or stay long enough when he visits.
I try to get over there at least once a week and we spend a few hours having lunch and doing errands she accumulates through the week. I know she loves me and means well but, for those of you that have mothers, you know that there are "buttons" that are painful and, well, it can be tedious. I know that she might outlive us all but what I'm way clear about at this point in our lives is that I need to enjoy her the best I can and all that I can for today.
God has repaired our lives together in a mystical way so that I can be truly useful to her today. When making amends to her some years ago, she allowed that she just wanted me "to be happy" - so, I try to show up, once a week ,and be happy.
Friday, she will turn 88. So today we went to a small local mountain town and ate Indian food that she had a taste for and then did a short drive in the mountains.
Perfect.
My son lives in downtown Denver. We get together every week for dinner together. It's just about 2 hours of time together but since he's an hour away, it involves a good part of a Wednesday evening. I do this, in part, because of amends owed to him. As the tornado that was raging through his life up until he was about 13 years old, it's a small price I've paid for the past ~10 years.
When anyone asks my about my son, I've learned to answer "he's fine" and change the subject. If someone I don't know persists, I ask them what they know about mental illness. After that, the trajectory of the conversation will go one way or another.
So, we get together. He rants about this, that and the other thing. Threatens, yells, blusters, threatens some more...
We have dinner, an ice cream cone and then I drop him off at his apartment.
I tell him I love him and that I'm proud of him. He says the same to me.
Perfect.
2 comments:
This post was very touching. Thank you for showing us what amends look like on a Wednesday.
You are making living amends which are great. I wish many times that I could have made those to my parents. But now I make them indirectly through caring about others and helping them whenever I can. Wonderful post.
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