After A Month Of Showering My Mother With Love ... =link= < 95% Validated >

But weakness, as it turns out, is just love that hasn’t been admitted yet. Let me be honest: my mother is still stubborn. She still interrupts me. She still watches the news too loudly. I still get impatient. The structural problems of our personalities didn’t disappear in thirty days.

So we sat in the parked car on the side of a suburban road and I told her the truth. “I saw you hesitate on the stairs. I realized I’ve been phoning it in. I’m not sick. I’m not dying. I just woke up. I’m sorry it took me forty-two years.” After a month of showering my mother with love ...

I took it as the highest compliment. You cannot pour love into a person without stirring up the sediment at the bottom of the glass. But weakness, as it turns out, is just

I wasn’t saving her. She was saving me. She still watches the news too loudly

Here is what I learned when I stopped holding back. My mother is not the hugging type. She is the “Did you eat?” type. She is the type who expresses love through folded laundry and the quiet act of leaving the last piece of chicken on the platter for you. We had a relationship that was efficient. We spoke twice a week. The conversations were predictable scripts: weather, work, the dog, a vague “I love you” muttered quickly before hanging up so neither of us had to sit with the vulnerability.

We spend our entire lives believing that love is a finite resource. We hoard it, protect it, and often, unintentionally, ration it out sparingly to those we assume will always be there. We tell ourselves, “I’ll call her tomorrow,” or “I’ll be more patient next time.” But tomorrow has a cruel habit of turning into a decade.