by BMK
My mom makes me think I’m failing.
I love my mom and she is nice to me. She doesn’t even ever talk about failure, she doesn’t criticize me, she wasn’t harsh on me as a kid. Nothing in my mom’s personality, in her words or actions, makes me think about failure.
But when my mom is around, or even when she phones me, all I can think of is the things I’m failing. I ate pizza for breakfast, and I left my coat on a bus, and I’m not really studying much French anymore. I’ve been sleeping past 11:00. I forgot to fix the screen door, and I forgot to call the allergy doctor. All these failures are so ready in my mind, when my mom is close.
My mom cares about me more than I do. Sometimes she visits me and brings food, or sometimes she visits me and starts washing the dishes. When my mom starts doing my chores, that’s a signal that I must have been living wrong. The way I cared about myself was not good enough. It turns out I am not ready to be my own person.
My mom planned a trip to Vancouver Island with my dad, and then my dad had to cancel, and then I got invited. I said sure. I was unemployed. Everyone knew I didn’t have anything important to do at home.
We went whale-watching. It felt great to be out in a boat in the sun, bumping along on the waves like a carnival ride. I liked wearing a life vest and stretching and looking at the mountains. We saw a big whale and our captain drifted around for an hour just to hover along with the whale. Then we got lunch at a tourist place with seagulls. I had a great day. Even the drive was nice.
I heard my mom tell the story of whale-watching many times, in the days after. She told it to our cousins inland, and then to our friend in Victoria, and then to our other cousins in Vancouver, on our way back. She had a good take on it — she figured out that the captain just took every tour group to the exact same spot, to see the exact same one whale every time. To me, this story felt like watching a long TV commercial. I heard her tell the same story the same way three times, plus I’d already lived through it with her.
We hiked up a big hill together, and she was a little slower than me, but she didn’t break a sweat. We went to the cheap restaurants with high ratings online, and I got her to try sushi. She drove me across the island, over and under the mountains. We saw on a hotel TV that the prime minister wore blackface to parties, and we both said What an idiot. We walked in the rain and saw the hundred-year-old trees with red bark.
It bothered me when she told me I should eat something — was she monitoring me for whether I’d eaten yet? It bothered me when she stopped at the info desk to get a map — why couldn’t she just use the iPad? It bothered me when she let the car rental guy talk her into buying extra insurance, and when she saw a sign at the bakery and pointed out, Hey look, they have a discount if you bring your own mug. It bothered me when she spent all morning planning out her route for how to get to the museum in the afternoon.
It happened a few times on our trip, that I had to stand up tall and say, Look, I know we are travelling together, but I wasn’t planning to eat every meal with you. I wasn’t planning to coordinate our wake-up times or to tell you where I was going on my walk or how soon I’d be back.
Sometimes when I said this stuff, my mom seemed hurt, she saw that it was a rejection. She saw what it meant, saw that I was happier in the moments when she was not in the room. Other times when I said it, she just shrugged and said yes of course, seemed surprised that it even needed to be said. But she always fell back into the habit of expecting me by her side. I said the speech three or four times, asking her for distance, but if I’d had the courage, I would have said it every day.
I was grumpy, and I was getting weird. I always felt like I was in the way. She caught me always muttering, “I’m sorry,” just as a reflex, like all the time. I wasn’t ashamed or guilty — I think I apologize whenever I don’t know what to do, don’t know how to be comfortable or to make other people comfortable.
My mom noticed that I wasn’t showering or brushing my teeth most days. I felt like I couldn’t, felt like the bathrooms were really her spaces and I didn’t know when it was OK for me to have a turn. I did say this to my mom, and I realize it might have hurt her.
I came home and ignored her calls for a few weeks and felt better, started breathing more naturally.
I saw my mom a few days ago, to drink some tea together and so I could mow her lawn. It felt great. I liked seeing her, for a visit. The next time I see her will be Thanksgiving dinner, and I’ll enjoy that too, for a visit. I did not like travelling with my mom to Vancouver Island. She still had fun on the trip, and I still had some fun on the trip sometimes. We both deserved better than what we got.
BMK doesn’t usually write much or travel much. In his spare time, he likes to stay at home and tend to his furniture.
describing space 