“I have maybe two evenings a month that are reliably clear. You want me to build a romantic relationship on two evenings a month.”
She gave me a look. “I want you to build something.”
It wasn’t that she was wrong. It was that “build something” required a stability of time and energy that I didn’t consistently have. I went on a few dates over the years. One led to three more dates and then stopped, partly because the person was genuinely uninteresting and partly because scheduling the fourth date had required moving it five times.
I’m not sad about this, exactly. I made the choices I made. I am saying that those choices had a texture, a life happening around and adjacent to them, that Daniel’s invoice did not account for. The invoice was about a transaction, and I had lived twelve years of something that was not primarily a transaction.
The house had its rhythms. I knew which floorboard creaked and where the furnace made a noise before it kicked on and that Mom always wanted the kitchen curtains open in the morning and closed after noon. I knew how to get her through a bad night, which approach worked when she was disoriented and scared, which phrases settled her and which ones made things worse. I knew her medical history in more detail than her doctors did sometimes, because I was the one at every appointment taking notes.
I knew her, is what I’m saying.
I also knew her in the way that you know people you live with for a long time, which includes all the things that are not beautiful. Her impatience when she felt helpless. Her habit of complaining about things she had decided to accept. The way she would thank me for something, genuinely and warmly, and then two days later act as if she’d done me a favor by letting me help. She was human. She was my mother. The relationship was everything a twelve-year relationship is, which is complex and frustrating and irreplaceable.