We become serious adults who don't care about how our parents live, only annoyed by overprotection. Read this story, call your mom and tell her how much you love her.
Mom is 73. She gives me pears and says in an apologetic tone:
"They don't look very pretty, but they're very tasty! Well your own, no chemicals, you like pears, take them.
I take them. And I take fermented baked milk. Because I like fermented baked milk.
And she has" accidentally one jar in the fridge, you're only leaving the day after tomorrow, you'll have a couple more dinners".
I get out, get in the car, and drive.
I'm going somewhere again. Once again, I'm going somewhere. I'm moving through cities and towns. Changing cities and time zones. Visiting my mother when I can.
After I'm done. After coffee with my friends and a manicure at the salon. I bring her something delicious, quickly ask about her business, listen impatiently - well, what kind of business do she and daddy have?
- I ironize her futile and insignificant, from my point of view, worries. And then I leave again, running off to do my own thing.
My mother is sure to tell me that I walk around naked, I don't wrap my throat, and that's why the cough won't go away. She will tell me that I work a lot, and it's time to calm down. He agrees that life is hard, and it's okay if I don't get to visit often.
And we live 40 kilometers away from each other. I call her regularly and listen to her unhurried and detailed stories about the market, about my sister, who has a hard time alone in the village, about the parsley that grew again after the rain and should be cut, and that the tomatoes ran out, even the green ones, what a drought was, and that Murat the cat lost his eye, nobody knows where he was ...
I'm not interested. And it seems to me that nothing important is going on in her life. And I'm a little angry when she complains to me about their illnesses, and I ask her to go to the doctor, and she waved it off, and I'm not a doctor, well, how do I know what medicine should be taken, after all!
Suddenly my mother says to me so pathetically: - Well, who do I complain, if not you ...?
And I freeze with the phone in my hand, and I realize that I am a rare bastard. And that her loud and vibrant voice in the phone, and all her words and phrases, and our eternal arguments about who is right, and the clarification of relations on and off, and her lectures and my admonitions - all this is our life. The one in here and now...
I jump out of my seat and go to her "unplanned," she manages to fry me some fish, my dad cuts up some watermelon and wants to pour some "young wine". Can't have wine, I'm driving. He drinks one, praises it. We laugh.
I wrap myself in my mother's sweater, it's chilly. Mom scrambles, runs to turn on the oven to "heat up the kitchen a little." And I'm a little girl again, with everything-all right. And everything is delicious. And it's warm. And there are no problems...
Mama-mama, you just live long, because I don't know what it's like not to hear your voice on the phone, because I don't know what it's like without your kitchen, where you feed me dinner and try to keep the house warm…