Mommy's Girl...At Least For a Moment

The other night I had this great conversation with my Mom.

Why would I blog about this? Isn't that common to bond with your mother?

Well, not so much for me.

Let me start from the beginning. I am the middle child of seven kids. I have three older sisters, two younger brothers and a younger sister. I am pretty much the only kid my Mom talks to on a regular basis. She is just not that easy to get along with, but she is my Mother and I refuse to make the choice that my sisters and brothers have made to cut her out of my life. (Incidentally, they have also made this choice with my Dad and I also disagree. Call it Middle Child Peacemaker Syndrome.)

But I was talking to her the other night on the phone and she brought up the whole baby plan thing. We were talking about it and of course she is excited for us. (Also, as strict Catholics, her and the whole side of her family are wondering why we don't have a baby yet. I practically had to hide to take my birth control pill when we visited them last year.) Anyways, I thought, as a woman who has had seven children maybe she can let me know a little bit of what I am in for. I asked her everything from her experience with morning sickness (horrible with my two older sisters, not so bad with the rest of us) to postpartum depression (never had it until she had me, but that could have been because her and my dad were about to finalize their divorce. Yeah, I was THAT baby.). She also told me about some other tough decisions she had to make that were pregnancy related, like how she felt when she gave my sister up for adoption when she was just 17 (my sister later found us) and an abortion that she had that she still thinks about and regrets every day of her life.

I am holding on to this conversation for dear life. I can remember one, just one, single moment in my childhood where I felt like my Mom was my Mother.

I was about to be going away for a week with my Dad to a desert camping trip. As she was driving me there the song "Somewhere Out There" came on the radio. At that moment she told me she was going to miss me and that I should kiss the stars good night every night and that she would do the same and then we would still be together. And I did it. Let me tell you I did it every single night. And when I came home I excitedly asked her if she got all my kisses and you know what she told me? She said that she didn't. She didn't get even one and she didn't believe I sent them. And that moment between her and I ended just like that. But at least it had started and that is what I hold on to.

So now we have had this one conversation and I am storing it up in that bank in my brain. Because now I have two memories. No matter what comes next these two will remain.