Come In, Mom
A story about the difference between being invited and being wanted
I have a box of photographs in my bedroom closet that I look at sometimes on quiet Sunday afternoons, the lid gone soft at the corners from years of being lifted and replaced. Nick at six with grass stains on both knees from a soccer game I coached from the sidelines with a thermos of coffee and absolutely no idea what I was watching. Nick at twelve in the kitchen doorway with a permission slip he had forgotten to show me until the night before the trip.
Nick at nineteen leaving for college with a duffel bag over each shoulder, not looking back until he was halfway down the walk, and then looking back, and the looking back was the thing I held onto in the months after. He has three children now. Emma, who is five and was described to me in detail over the phone in each of the seven calls Nick and I had over the past year.
Two boys, Liam and Jacob, who are eight and six, and who I know primarily from photographs Linda posts online, which I look at on my tablet in the evenings, zooming in on their faces the way you do when a screen is all you have been given. I live in New Mexico. They live in Oregon.
That is a four-and-a-half-hour flight, which is not impossibly long, which is the kind of distance that surrenders to genuine effort. The effort had not been genuine for a while. On both sides, if I am being fair, which I try to be.
My health had made the previous two years difficult in ways that limited travel, and I had let that become the explanation for everything, including the things that were not really about my health. And Nick had been busy in the way of people with young children and demanding careers and lives that have filled in every available space with obligation, and he had let that become the explanation for everything too, including the things that were not really about being busy. So we had existed in the particular arrangement that adult children and their parents sometimes fall into, where everyone means well and contact diminishes anyway, where calls happen at the margins of attention and visits get planned and replanned until they become a category of aspiration rather than a commitment.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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