Talked to Mom today, for the first time in a few weeks. We live 600 miles apart. Six hundred miles is about the right distance for most of my nuclear family to have between them. There are many reasons for this, but most of them are difficult to nail down and talk about. I'm convinced it's true, however, that it's a good idea. A psychologist I once visited on a regular basis told me that it was, and I believed him.
Still, it sometimes seems hard to keep safely away from nuclear family. Who else can you turn to for some kind of confimation about your life overview? Mom, for instance, is 90 years old, and an inspiration for growing old and keeping active. I can only hope I have inherited her consitution and vigor. I love my Mom, and she loves me. In her way. It's just that a family is not always what it is expected to be, or rather what Beaver Cleaver would have had us believe it should be, some decades agon on his popular and mythical TV show.
Mom and I had a good talk on the phone. We both live alone, we both garden, we both love cats, and we think alike about a lot of things. Sometimes I think we get along so much better now that we're both older. My father passed away 2 years ago, Mom survived a bout of breast cancer, me and my siblings all moved far from the nest and have had our own lives for years. We aren't all in each other's face. We've all gotten past some invisible barrier to peaceful co-existence. I think.
But none of this is really what I mean. What I mean is: sometimes we love people, and don't know how to love them. What I mean is, sometimes people change, and understand things that were never in their universe before a certain point in time. Sometimes, when you get older, you become a different person.
Mom is a good example, to me, that Second Chances happen at any age. That's good to know.
Still, it sometimes seems hard to keep safely away from nuclear family. Who else can you turn to for some kind of confimation about your life overview? Mom, for instance, is 90 years old, and an inspiration for growing old and keeping active. I can only hope I have inherited her consitution and vigor. I love my Mom, and she loves me. In her way. It's just that a family is not always what it is expected to be, or rather what Beaver Cleaver would have had us believe it should be, some decades agon on his popular and mythical TV show.
Mom and I had a good talk on the phone. We both live alone, we both garden, we both love cats, and we think alike about a lot of things. Sometimes I think we get along so much better now that we're both older. My father passed away 2 years ago, Mom survived a bout of breast cancer, me and my siblings all moved far from the nest and have had our own lives for years. We aren't all in each other's face. We've all gotten past some invisible barrier to peaceful co-existence. I think.
But none of this is really what I mean. What I mean is: sometimes we love people, and don't know how to love them. What I mean is, sometimes people change, and understand things that were never in their universe before a certain point in time. Sometimes, when you get older, you become a different person.
Mom is a good example, to me, that Second Chances happen at any age. That's good to know.
God speed to your Mom, and to you!
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