Her Birthday

Today is my mom’s birthday. She’d be sixty-seven. I woke up early to dye my hair this morning and thought, “Oh, I’ll Skype her while it’s setting,” just for a tiny, terrible moment. I’ve been wanting to call her for days.

This time last year I was in Miami with her, making pasta for her birthday dinner. I think radiation had just started so she still had her hair and wasn’t as tired as she got later. My sister and I got her a necklace; I don’t remember what we did with it, now.

The year before that she was here with me in New Zealand—we were in Rotorua and we went to the Mitai cultural performance and had a hangi for dinner and trifle for dessert and then for a surprise I bought us a night nature walk afterwards and she was so thrilled to see some native New Zealand birds. The next day we went to the Polynesian Spa for volcanic mud wraps and walked by the lake, watching the gannets and the thermal activity.

I didn’t write about it at the time because I was beginning to get bored of blogging, which seems silly now, but I remember the trip very well: I remember the quick flight up to Rotorua where we drank tea and ate biscuits and she talked about her plans to retire in 2012, about how she was going to be closer to my sister (who was pregnant at the time) and help raise her grandchildren. We talked about what kind of garden she would grow and how it would be different to the ones she had in Miami. We used to talk like that a lot, just kind of chatting. I guess a lot of mothers and daughters do that.

She was only here for a couple of weeks. We went down to Golden Bay after that and then had a couple of days in Wellington before she went back home. It was right after the second Christchurch earthquake and a friend of a friend’s father had just died, and I remember deciding to take those days off completely from work because I didn’t want to regret not spending more time with her. She met some of my friends and I think we would have gone out for lunch a few times. She modified a t-shirt of mine while she was here and admired my little flat. She learned her way to the dairy and to the grocery store and we talked about when she was retired, when she would stay in my guest room for at least a month a year. ”At least a month, Mom,” I would have said. “A month minimum.”

She left us four months ago, almost exactly. I am so tired of not being able to talk to her. I want my mom. I want my mom. I want my mom.