Anything At All

Dear Mom,

Mother’s Day came early this year. I had nothing planned at all.

I’ve been living the life of an entertainer. I live the way my father lived when you were married to him: traveling, sleeping, eating, working late, and calling you hardly at all.

This Mother’s Day, I took in your glowing face. I had spent a half hour googling audiobook gift certificates as a vaguely thoughtful gesture, but failed to follow through in time. Which means my gift to you was, once again, a pixeled Facetime call.

The video was choppy. You sat at the dinner table beaming, golden white hair framing your dimples. Your glasses and green eyes catching the kitchen light. You accepted me, long ago, as a last-minute, sometimes not-at-all, gift giver, a cheap and scatterbrained artist with bigger intentions than results. So I just beamed back, said something charming and worldly.

Our relationship is solid. But I still resent you sometimes.

Why wasn’t I more set up to succeed? I sometimes think. Why didn’t you enroll me in a bilingual school, or piano lessons, or guitar? Why did you insist on supporting ‘whatever I wanted’? You let me enroll in the wrong college program, where I flailed about, floundered, and ran out of money. You let me choose dance, of all career choices. And you let me fall in love with moody assholes who obliterated my self esteem.

Why?

I resent your free and uncomplicated belief in me. The way you let me tumble out into the world after high school, making my own decisions: an indifferent cat padding through its whims and instincts. I resent being allowed to leap and fall and quietly begin a fresh climb, without any kind of judgment or worry from you.

Of course, it’s not really you I’m resenting. I resent being trusted to make my own decisions, because I resent myself.

You let me move out, just shy of my 19th birthday. I never looked back, moving first downtown, then to the next province, then to the next country. I lived for over a decade in Los Angeles and New York, flying home to the Canadian prairies the bare minimum: once a year, sometimes less if I was working or broke. You mailed me socks and shoes and the latest superfoods. Bought tickets to my shows when you could manage a week off. You never once complained that I wasn’t home, wasn’t calling enough. If you resented me you kept it to yourself, quietly accepting my scarce and hurried presence in your life.

I wanted the world to know that I was smart. That I was sexy, adventurous and free. I wanted to float through exotic places and brush past interesting people. You knew this, and you let me go. You made it easier than it would have been for other daughters.

I took your kindness, your dedication, and your Canadian ‘chill’ with me everywhere. To the American South, to Brooklyn, to Kuala Lumpur, to Saudi Arabia, to the breezy palms of Southern California, to ships in the middle of the sea. I took your patient upbringing, your independence and your chia seeds with me on tours and trams.

You caught up only when it was convenient for me.

You buried your father and your mother. I was not there.

You flew to my last minute wedding by a Texas pond. You flew me home three years later when my divorce was imminent. I did not stay long.

The years became passing trains. We fell into a rhythm of calls and last minute gifts. The real gift is the call itself. The real gift is the catch up. We roll off the highlights and cut straight to the laugh. We have worn in our roles: “adventurous daughter” and “cool mom.” We play them with ease now.

This Mother’s Day, two weeks late, 35 years into this life as your child, I have a confession.

I never really saw myself admitting this. I have spent years, in fact, trying to bury it, trying to prove it false somehow. But I have carried it for too long.

I pretend to be so busy. I have trained you to expect as few calls and visits as possible in the name of “saving money” and “being independent”. I tell you I know what I’m doing and where I’m headed. But the truth is you are the only thing keeping me afloat.

I can do nothing without your voice. I am lost without your face.

The truth is I am nothing without you.

I am a sob. A drooling baby. A toddler tripping over herself.

I am a decision-less idler. A girl playing dress-up. I am winging adulthood. I have been pretending to be smart this whole time. I am an idiot, googling how to be a good person.

Every accomplishment of note, including my very survival, comes from you. You are the resilience in my muscles. You are the root of my charm. You are the care behind my yes’s and no’s. You are the beat-centered music, the denim jacket, and the warm perspective that keeps my friends close. You are my ability to forgive. You are the only thread of patience I possess.

I have zigzagged across oceans and barreled down highways, with nothing to offer but the heart that you made and the love that you put there. I have spent my adult life trying to be this fresh and total person, but I am only you. Creating so much distance between us only made it more ironic. Silly almost.

I am anything at all because I am you.

I admit it now, because I’m tired of pretending. I accept that I am not on some undiscovered, untrod path. I am on the trail that you blazed, with the sturdy legs that you built, in the shoes that you bought and mailed to me in a cardboard box with an obnoxious amount of tape.

You are my mother: you are the world I inhabit, the heart that holds me together and the voice that pulls me out of my own darkness.

I am slowly making my way back to you, like an old friend finding their way home. I have gathered my stories to lay at your feet. I will come to shovel your driveway. I will flip through all your printed photos and hit play on your favorite videos. I will try on all your clothes and buy you dinner.

I will release the resentment.

Thank you for teaching me who I am, by letting me go.