Life as we know has changed. But life as I knew it had already changed.
COVID-19 has turned the world upside down, mine included. Along with social distancing, I’ve lost my job as so many sectors, including the cultural non-profit world, take major economic hits. So I did what was available to me — I went for a run in my neighborhood. It felt good to sweat. Good to get outside. And as someone who pretty much always runs alone, even in groups (turns out there always was a public health advantage to being the slowest runner in the group), the solo run was both welcome and routine.
It was while I was walking during my cool down that I noticed the tree. Was this a spring bud? Or could this be considered a leaf?
My mom would have a definitive opinion on this.
My mom. How I wish I could call her right this minute. It’s been a month since she died after a long battle with lung cancer which had spread to her spine. My grief is still on-going. My world irrevocably changed. The sting of the global pandemic isn’t as harsh as it would be, because I’m already in world of emotional hurt and upheaval.
It’s funny that the thing I want to do most is call my mom. Because I spent the better part of my 20s attempting to avoid her call. She is the reason I got call-waiting. It’s not that I didn’t want to talk with her. It’s that I didn’t want to talk with her 20 times a day.
It’s a case of the proverbial apple and tree and I’m sure some type of genetic behavior. It was in the early 2000s when my maternal grandmother died. Mom was crying on the couch one day, saying how much she wished the phone would ring with her mom on the other end of the line.
Of course she had her own issues with her mother calling every day. Back in the 1980s there was something called regional long distance. We lived in Lockport. My grandmother in Buffalo. It was a more expensive call, except after 5 p.m. and on weekends. So every day, without fail, my grandmother would call at 5 p.m. And so often it infuriated my mother. She was dealing with two kids and trying to get dinner ready for all of us as my dad was on his way home from work. Really, she didn’t have time to talk.
And now? Now, all she wanted was to talk to her mom. To have that phone ring five seconds after 5 p.m. All she wanted was the disruption.
I looked at the tree as it began to come back to life. This was something that caused my mother endless wonder. She would call my brother every year to express her wonder: Yesterday there were buds on the trees and now there are leaves! It was an amazing, awe-inspiring, and optimistic process.
Which was funny coming from my mom. If “Worst-Case Scenario” were an Olympic sport she would be a five-time gold medalist. It was often why I would wait to tell her things, good things, things I was excited about, because inevitably her comment would include the word “but” or “just” or some other qualification that shredded my unbridled joy and optimism into piles of doubt. She didn’t do it to be mean. She didn’t want to tear my dreams down. She was trying to protect me, to keep me from getting hurt. She wanted me to see the whole board — the negative and the positive.
But I didn’t always see the whole board with her.
Because the woman who would second-guess everything, was the same woman who was awed by the simple budding of the trees each and every spring. She was the same woman who, when we were traveling some place and it was raining with a sky that looked to be a sheet of solid gray, would scan the horizon for one tiny spot of hope and say, “Look, it’s brighter over there.” Even if the “over there” wasn’t the direction in which we were heading. There still, somewhere, was a bright spot.
I learned from my mom that we call contain contradictions. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, we are vast. We contain multitudes.
Call waiting saved my relationship with my mother because I didn’t have to talk with her. And now, what I wouldn’t give to be able to talk with her again.
