"Girls! You don't have any ice in these trays!" This is my mother yelling.
Sheepishly, I walk into the kitchen and take a peek in the freezer. Acting surprised at the four empty ice trays growing ice crystals but housing no cubes, I shrug, "Sometimes I forget." Holding her glass of white wine, my mother sighs and opens a bottle of red. "I can't drink warm white wine." She raises her eyebrows to enhance the importance of this wisdom. "You don't drink white wine warm."
When my mother visits, everything is better. The food is better because it's either from a restaurant or leftovers from home. The smell is better because my mother knows how to change my air conditioner's filter. My bed feels better because my mother brought a comforter that actually has been laundered during the past three months. And I am better because finally I have something to myself. I don't have to share my mother like I share the library and the classrooms and the sidewalks; she's all mine - OK, and my sister's.
As fluid as my mother's re-entrance into my life may seem, there are definitely holes that cannot be filled during the span of a two-day visit. My mother questions my empty freezer. She also questions my empty fridge. Apparently rationing food for a period of time is more economical than a late night happy-go-lucky binge.\nThese bumps, though, are ones I can handle. I know I should save my money more and stop sending my parents the bill for candy I buy at the bookstore. I know I should sweep every once in a while and that cleaning the dishes before the bugs come makes the kitchen a more welcoming environment. If the only bumps my mother's re-entrance introduced were words of caution and advice with a little scolding on the side, I'd be fine.
But I have this problem where I like to talk. In high school, talking to my mom led to discussions about my grade point average. In college, talking to my mom generally addresses more personal, life-changing issues. I like to tell her everything that goes on in my life because without all that background information, how could she understand why and when and how I make certain decisions? My friends have been warning me against this kind of talking for years. They tell me over and over to keep some things to myself. "Why would you tell your mom that?" I hear the refrain again and again, but I can't help it. If my mother doesn't know the truth, then certainly she can't know me, and then we wouldn't have a meaningful relationship.
So my mother unloads the car and hands me a green bean casserole and a pasta dish, and I start talking. I tell her about a guy I've met. She asks how we met. I bite my lip and consider. What my friends don't know is that I pause before I talk. I think before I speak. I hesitate before I go all out. But I still tell her. Sometimes I just have to tone it down. It's in this intermingling of telling my stories and toning my stories down that I hit way too many bumps for comfort.
The questions look like this: But what exactly did you do? When did you go home? How could you have done that? Don't you have class then? Why did your sister tell me something different? Well, what I did was fun and I went home eventually and actually that class isn't that important and she must have been confused. In trying to tell my mother the truth, I end up digging myself a hole of white lies. I go in too deep before I realize that maybe I don't want my mother to know where I spend every minute of every day, especially if that day is Thursday, Friday or Saturday. Or sometimes Wednesday.
The worst part of this digging deep is what I see at the bottom of my hole: my mother's face. Her confused and concerned face. I can handle the concern but I do not like the confused. What could she possibly be confused about? The regret I feel from telling the story immediately turns into anger. I don't like that my mother's confused face comes as a response to me saying how much fun I had, how great my new friend is, how worthwhile it is to sleep in until noon.
If my mother is concerned, she wants me to reconsider my actions. If she's confused, she doesn't know why I'm acting that way in the first place. And the reason for all the talking surfaces. I need my mother to approve. I need to push the limits of her acceptance and see how far she'll follow me until all my truths become too much for her. I see her confused face and I feel insecure. The stories I have and the things I'm not confident about lay at her feet, and I don't know if I should take them back or force them on her.
Always, though, the stories stay on the ground, in between us. We are not fighting and we may not even be disagreeing, but we can't jump into that in-between space together. Maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe she simply cannot understand how a 19-year-old in 2010 acts. Maybe she can't accept that I'm 19 years old.
During dinner tonight, I started a story in my head and almost let it fall out. But then I stopped, hesitating longer than usual. During that in-between time, my mother, holding a glass of chilled white wine, fluidly filled in our table and our plates with stories from college: "We all just kind of hung out," she said. And I'll take even more advice from my mother and her storytelling tactics: Less is more.
Connelly's column runs weekly Thursdays. She can be reached at c.hardaway@cavalierdaily.com.
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