The ♥ of Addiction



pumpkin-marketIts that time of year again, when the leaves are turning, a chill is in the air and people begin to get ready for the thanks-oweenie-mas-ukah celebrations.  I’d be a broken record if I said yet again that my mother’s birthday was Halloween … or that it will be five years this winter since Mom stopped taking my calls, or emails or cards of well wishing.  I’d like to be able to say that in some way, shape or form that I’ve moved on … that the hurt lessens (or is that lessons? 😉  over time.  That I have made peace with Mom’s unannounced departure from my life.  But its simply not true, not this year.  Not yet.  I still find that I spend time inside my mind in imaginary conversations with Mom, mostly beating myself up for not being good enough in her eyes or trying to figure out why it is that she left.  Even my youngest daughter has her own mental stories that haunt her in the dark places of her meaning making machine.  She said to me this week, “You know Mom, she’s going to be 70 this year.  And you won’t be able to say Happy Birthday to her.  And she’s going to die sometime soon and you will never get to talk to her before she dies.”  I think in truth, she was working on her method acting skills and looking for fodder that would help make her cry on cue.  But I also suspect in the back of her mind she worries about someday being estranged from me.  Its unconscionable at some level– my spell checker would like me to consider unconventional, which may be just as true, but more likely it is simply uncomfortable to sit with that feeling that someone you love .. indeed the first person you ever loved in your life and who was the first person to love you when life entered your lungs … could walk away and keep walking without ever looking back to see you cry.

I’ve called my mother’s cell phone every once in a blue moon just to see if it’s in service … just so she knows that I am sending Love her way .. and just to see that she still won’t answer my calls.  Today … for the first time in near five years … someone answered the phone.  English was a second language to the person on the line, so my daughter tried in spanish “Estoy llamando para hablar con mi abuela?”  Turns out they were Asian.  The quality of some cell phones is simply dismal.  We actually called three times, not quite convinced that Mom wasn’t there.  Because for years, this was the number we had for her.  And the fact that it didn’t answer was her usual MO.  Being the geek that I am (and feeling rather desparate) I paid one of the peek-at-u places $1.95 to do a reverse lookup on the number and tell me about the person who owned that phone number.  You see, this is how we found out it was an Asian family.  Nope.  It wasn’t Mom.  May not have been her number for years now.  Of course, I paid the detective place another $1.95 when they said that they could do a reserve look up on my mother’s last known address and that they FOUND a phone number and email address for her.  Unfortunately as soon as my credit card cleared it came back and confirmed only my mother’s NAME … which of course I already knew.  And that she lived at the address where my daughter saw her last spring.  But no phone number or email address was listed.  So … I sent her a case of soup from Amazon for her birthday.  ~shrugs~

Some addictions just linger on .. long after the hope is lost.  I have been phoning a number for years now, that isn’t my mother’s.  Why?  Because I haven’t been able to LET GO.  She’s my Mom.  I love her.  And I miss her.  And the pain in my heart still makes me cry every now and Zen.

Pity I’m not working on a method acting role myself, because I can cry on the flip of a coin.  Its just my nature.  But over the years, I have been at least successful in depersonalizing the tears.  I’ve come to see emotions as clouds that float into our emotional atmosphere and occasionally drop toxic rain upon our fields of glory.  There’s not much to figure out anymore.  I know my family’s skeletons and I don’t go digging up bones.  And I realize fully that my mother is not responsible for my happiness or my melancholy moments.  As I told my eldest this week who was feeling frustrated by a situation at her work … “Don’t worry about the mind going off to fret about it.  Its just doing what it does by design.  And don’t be too concerned about needing to find a solution (when there doesn’t appear to be one) because in truth .. if it wasn’t THIS, then your mind would go and find something ELSE to obsess upon.”  Its just what minds do.  It isn’t the content that we need to change, we simply need to stop believing it as true.  Then, when we can see the NON sense of it all, it becomes only the background elevator music in our life.

And of course, until we stop getting ON that elevator … our heart will just keep going up and down and the addiction will smolder under the ashes of dreams that never can come true.

Well, for me at least one thing is certain … I won’t be calling that phone number any more.  🙂

Leave a Reply