I love my mom

I  was hiding in the closet again.

Sometimes my life overwhelms me. Sometimes being within the same four walls as seven children, months-on-end with no breaks in between? Sometimes that makes me insane. Because, dear readers, it is precisely at those times that I want to throttle each and every one of them. Or, maybe, just throttle myself.

Most times, family and friends voice praise over my ability to cope with the insanity. In truth, I sometimes impress myself. One generally doesn’t notice the world speeding by one’s car window ; one is usually focused on the drive ahead.

But sometimes, when I look through the passenger window … somehow… I implode.

And there’s the thing, right there—the whole WHY I am hiding in the closet. Why I am cloistered away with a glass of wine in one hand and the phone in the other, babbling quietly to my mother, my sacred female friend, my one-true confidant. The fact is, I don’t want anyone I live with, or more accurately, anyone I come into contact with anywhere, to know how freaked out I can get. On rare occasions, I reach out to people when I am in this state—and by people, I mean my mom. And only my mom.

“I just can’t take it sometimes, mom,” I weep loudly. “This stress. I’m so overwhelmed, it’s so much bigger than I am, I can’t even move. I’m that big rock in that story, and the stress is going to spring from me like water. Next thing, I’ll be a giant river of stress, overflowing with the hugeness of it all.” I take a sip of wine. And sob.

Pause. “So you’re like a big rock with a river flowing out of you?” she queries.

“YES!” I wail.

“Oh, honey.” Silence. I continue to sob. She let’s me.

Mom doesn’t speak but I hear her sigh and feel her empathy through the phone line. Of the two in this conversation, she’s the one that walks the more tenuous line. She knows she can’t say, “Wow, it is hard,” because then I’ll play it down. No-no, I’ll say; no, everything isn’t so bad. I’m probably just PMS. My life isn’t hard.

But this is one of those moments—one of those, I think, distinctly female moments, where the act of crying is a stress reliever in and of itself. And my mom knows I’m not calling her to solve my problems; she knows I don’t expect a plan of attack, or Confucian advice. She knows I don’t need institutionalization. At least not today.

My mom knows my plaintive wailing like the back of her hand. She has seen it and heard and helped me though it for decades. Nobody else understands me like she does.

My tears dry up and eventually, her empathy has me laughing. Her experiences, her reflections, and through them, her reminders that this, too, shall pass all bring me back to a place of reassurance and restored sanity. Her sweet voice, our twin cackling laughter, her loving nature returns me to a place of balance.

Eventually I can come out of the closet.

It seems that the only cure all for my self-inflated misery is her presence. I’ll be 40-years-old this month, but sometimes? Sometimes I still just need my mommy.

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