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Weeks 13 to 15
Emotional Days
Last time I had a revelation about brotherhood. Since then I have been thinking about motherhood and how easily it can go off course. I look at my relationship with Henry and can’t imagine anything that would ever come between us. Then I look at my own mother and wonder how our connection was severed, and when I stopped wishing it would mend.
My friends and colleagues note my ever-changing physique with sheer joy. Such a contrast. My mother has yet to even see me. This fact would be less dramatic if my family were large, if my mother didn’t live a few blocks away, if I weren’t her only child. But there are so few of us you can count everyone on your fingers, and proximity has done nothing to improve our relationship, and it seems as though having one child was one child too many for her. As full as my life is, I am ultimately very much alone.
This is the harsh truth about my mother: She’s pretty and vibrant and smart. She’s completely self-absorbed. She has shown no interest in her grandson (or her grandson-to-be). She has never offered to baby-sit, and seldom attempts to see him. From the day he was born, she has made a point of extracting herself from my family.
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The examples are plentiful and often too painful for me to recount. When Henry was a few days old, she announced that she was selling her antique mahogany dining room table because she’d cooked too many family dinners and was all finished with that sort of thing. She never came over to help me with the baby. (It took me years to realize that perhaps she should have!) A few sleepless months later, I asked her to take Henry for a night so that my husband and I could attempt to reconnect, and she said he’d have to be old enough to sleep through it. When he was, she said he’d need to be potty trained, and now that he is, she has found other reasons why hosting him is simply impossible. She has bought him next to nothing and never makes plans to play with him. Meanwhile, she has yet to ask me how my pregnancy is coming along, or even to congratulate Jack, whom she has passed on the street three times and dodged completely.
If I let myself soak it all in, it hurts. But part of being an adult is learning not to need the support and approval of one’s parents. Instead, I drink in all the overflowing satisfaction I get from Henry, who now makes a daily event of talking to his baby brother through my belly. He kisses it good morning and snuggles with it at night. He nuzzles me/us/him and says, “I love you, baby” over and over again. Last night I made Henry promise to kiss and snuggle with me even when he turned 40 and he said, perplexed, “Of course! Why wouldn’t I?” Then I remembered that I am almost 40, and I haven’t kissed or snuggled with my mother in more than half my life.
I suppose the other part of being an adult is doing things better than those who taught you how. Mark my words, mommy, I will never abandon my sons.
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