Small things. Ordinary things. The texture of a family relationship recalibrating itself toward something that functions better.
I don’t know if it will hold. I don’t know if the recalibration survives the next crisis, the next wedding, the next Sunday dinner where someone needs something and assumes I’m the person who can provide it. Families have momentum. The momentum of this family for thirty-two years has included a certain assumption about who I am and what I have available.
Momentum can change. It changes slowly. It doesn’t change all at once because one conversation happened.
But it has, in my direct experience over the last several months, changed.
My mother called me last Tuesday. Not about anything in particular — she calls on Tuesdays sometimes, a habit from when I was in college and called her every week on a specific evening. She asked about the course. She asked about work. She asked if I’d eaten dinner.
I said yes.
She said, “What did you have?”
I said pasta with the sauce from the recipe she gave me when I moved into my apartment, the one that takes forty minutes but is worth it.
She said that was good. She said she was glad I was cooking.
It was a very ordinary phone call. At the end of it she said, “I love you, Nora.”
I said, “I know. I love you too.”
Both things were true at the same time, the way they’ve always been.
I hung up and sat at my kitchen table for a minute, not really thinking about anything, just sitting with the fact that the phone call had felt almost normal. Not quite normal. Close to it. Closer than it’s felt in a while.