News about Chloe occasionally filtered through the family grapevine. She was apparently doing very well at her new corporate job in Texas. She had bought a nice apartment downtown.
She had started casually dating someone new, then abruptly stopped. My mother flew out to visit her exactly once and apparently came back complaining bitterly to Aunt Susan that Chloe was too busy with her friends and work to spend enough quality time with her. When I heard that detail, I found it so predictably, hilariously ironic that I actually laughed out loud in my car.
For a long time, I wondered whether my mother would eventually find a sneaky way around the phone block. She didn't. Maybe she finally truly understood I was serious.
Maybe she decided I was too cruel and stubborn to bother with anymore. Maybe Chloe became emotionally available to her again and her need for me passed. I eventually stopped trying to solve the puzzle of her motives.
I also realized something surprising. I still missed my mother sometimes. That realization made me incredibly angry at first. I thought missing her meant I was weak or that I secretly wanted to subject myself to the relationship again.
It didn't. I miss pieces of her. I miss the mother who used to bring me hot chicken soup and stroke my hair when I had the flu as a kid. I miss the way she used to laugh so hard at certain terrible jokes that she couldn't even finish the punchline.
I missed the simple universal comfort of having a mother I could call when I didn't know how to bake a turkey. Even though the real actual experience of calling her had almost always ended up hurting me, you can profoundly miss a person and still logically know that giving them access to your life is dangerous for both of you. It took me an embarrassingly long time and a lot of therapy to accept that.
One evening, years after the viral pregnancy post that had kicked off this final round of chaos, I was standing in my kitchen again. It was a different season, a different year, but the same granite counter. Maya, now an incredibly stubborn toddler, was sitting on the floor, passionately trying to convince Leo that a plastic mixing spoon absolutely belonged inside his school backpack. Leo was pretending to be furious, scowling at her while obviously encouraging her by leaving the backpack unzipped.
Marcus was at the sink rinsing dinner dishes and mildly telling both of them to stop putting random kitchen objects into school supplies. I was exhausted. My feet hurt. There were crushed cracker crumbs all under the dining table.