I called my mom a few weeks ago, and we talked for an hour and a half. The one thing I truly remember from the call was gosh it’s so good to hear my Momma laugh again. Really deeply laugh. To hear how happy she was about the grandkids playing on the stairs and just chatting in the living room with my siblings and their significant others. It’s so so good to hear Momma happy about life again.
Why you ask?
My parents officially got divorced in July of 2019. But the marriage was seriously imploding when I was home in early 2018. Personally, I had just decided to change career paths, so I came home for the comfort, for the support, for the love. In reality I came home to life being turned upside down for everyone. That was a tough time.
Two of the toughest things I went through was listening to my Momma, my rock…so uncertain about her life. I won’t go into details because I’m respecting their privacy, but my Father left my Mother. My Mother wanted to try to work things out. She wanted to keep trying. Father didn’t, and he left.
My parents had given up their whole lives to make us their whole lives. That was the respectable thing to do. They had become each other’s best friends. They had become best friends and not lovers anymore.
And when my father left, my mother lost the life she thought she would always have and her best friend. It broke my heart when my mother’s biggest confession to me was, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t have any friends. I’m in my 60’s. How do I even make friends at this age? What do I do?”
I just thought my poor mother in her late 60’s and her life is getting turned upside down. And her biggest fear was she would be alone. She wouldn’t have anyone to share life with anymore. She wouldn’t have anyone to laugh with anymore, even if my parents hadn’t done much laughing in the last bit of their marriage, she was afraid of being alone.
I reassured my mother that she was a quite lovely woman, intelligent, caring (in her own way), and fun to be around. She A. had friends and B. could easily make new connections.
I wouldn’t say my mother is completely healed yet by any means, but I will say since all the divorce things started, I’ve been so proud of her. She’s been getting out of her comfort zone and doing the things she always wanted to do…all on her own. Course she goes with other people, but she doesn’t have the security of a significant other to travel with her.
She is such an amazingly strong wild woman. That I feel so blessed to have in my life. I feel so blessed I was able to be at home when life was getting turned upside down. I feel so blessed I can talk to my mother as a friend. I feel so blessed while she doesn’t understand a damn thing I do anymore…yet she supports me and she loves me through it all.
I feel so blessed to hear my mother laugh again. Genuinely laugh at the simple happiness she has in her daily life. You are not alone, your experience is unique, but you are not alone. Maybe you need to reach out to someone. Maybe it's time to take a break from the game of “everything is okay, I’m fine”, and tell a close friend or relative “Hey, I need something.” Because no matter how hard we try to control it. No matter how hard we try to make it exactly what we want. Sometimes life is still just flat out tough, and we aren’t meant to do this alone.
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