My mom has been coming over almost every day. My son’s school ends right in the middle of my daughter’s naptime, and I need someone to be home just in case my daughter wakes up while I’m gone. I tried pushing her naptime an hour later which I immediately realized is not a good idea unless you happen to like screaming, crying, inconsolable children. Personally, I do not. I considered asking my 93 year old neighbor to come over while I pick up my son, but that’s a lot to ask especially if my 3 year old wildling-of-a-child wakes up during the 20 minutes I’m gone. I also considered paying a babysitter, but who wants to pay someone to sit on the couch quietly for 30 minutes? Again, I do not.
Enter Grammy.
My mom (aka Grammy) has been coming over most days of the week to stay with my daughter and like any Filipino mom she’s incredibly helpful. If she’s not washing the dishes I’ve left in the sink, she’s folding laundry, or sweeping. (To my Filipinx readers: the sweeeeeeeeeping, right? It’s endless. It’s graceful. Slightly hunched over, rhythmically gliding the walis tambo in short sweeps of the wrist and every so often the loooooong sweep engaging the entire arm all the way up to the shoulder. It’s an artform, but I digress.)
This particular afternoon my son had jiu-jitsu so my husband comes home and in a whirlwind picks Ben up, gets him changed and takes him off to jiu-jitsu. Normally when my husband comes home is about the same time my mom decides to leave. As soon as he walks through the door, she picks up her bag and she’s ready to go as if to say, “Okay someone else is here to take care of you now. My job is over. He’s going to take the next shift.” It’s reminiscent of my wedding day and her overall role in my life since I’ve gotten married, but today, my husband and Ben had left so it’s just me and my daughter at home. My mom parks herself on the couch and we start to have a little bit of girl chat.
She loves to gossip. She’ll hate me for saying that and she’ll deny it, but it’s true. She’s telling me all sorts of things about people I’ve never met or don’t remember, telling me her drama (which isn’t really drama) like how she doesn’t know what to get her best friend for her birthday next week. I’m throwing out suggestions, she doesn’t like any of them, but I can tell she just wants to talk and I’m enjoying this conversation with her. It doesn’t involve religion, politics, my body, or my parenting style so I’m here for it.
We chatted for about an hour. The sun is starting to set and I tell my mom she should probably get going now. “You’re welcome to stay” I say, “but I know you don’t like driving at night” (mostly because she can’t see at night.)
So she leaves my house. I start a load of laundry and go outside to play with my daughter. Eventually, my husband and son get home. I notice that the street lights have turned on and it’s starting to get dark. My phone rings. It’s my dad. My dad is at an age where you need to answer the phone if he’s calling, and he doesn’t call unless he needs something so you definitely need to answer. Every time.
I answer and he asks, “Where’s your mom?” and I say, “I don’t know….Isn’t she there?” which I realize now is a dumb question. He says, “No, she’s not here.” I ask him if he tried calling her and he says yes. I tell him she left here about an hour ago (or so I think). I say maybe I should call her and he tells me not to because she’s probably driving.
My mom lives about 5 or 6 miles from my house. As slow as she may drive, it should not take her, under any circumstances, an hour to get home, even if she got stopped behind every train on her way there. Now I’m thinking this is weird, and I’m starting to worry. Of course, I’m assuming the worst. Then I see my husband’s face or maybe he sees mine and he’s mirroring me but the look on his face is concern, deep concern.
I get off the phone and he says, “Do you want me to go?”
“Where?” I ask.
“Well, what route does she take home?” he says.
“Orangethorpe.” I say.
Then he tells me he’s just going to drive up and down Orangethorpe looking for her. And I say no. Plus if anyone’s going to go, I’m going to go. You put the kids down and I’m going to go look for my mom, I think to myself.
We’re trying to work out the logistics to see how viable this concern is and he’s asking me what time she left.
“Did she leave 10 minutes after we left?” he asks. I tell him, “No, she stayed and she chatted with me for about an hour.” It’s now 7 o’clock. I thought she left at 6 but I’m not sure, and then I noticed the timer I had set to change over the laundry – a timer for one hour. It’s now down to 18 minutes so I’m thinking she left 40 minutes ago. It does not take 40 mins to get from my house to her house. I grab my keys and say, “I’m just gonna go. I can drive down to their house and back in 30 minutes” and I leave.
I get in my car and call my best friend because we grew up during a time where talking on the phone was still a thing and our friendship is deeply rooted in free mobile-to-moblie. Now that I have kids I have to sneak in phone calls whenever I get a chance. I’m driving. I’m driving and I’m looking. I’m driving and I’m looking but I don’t see her. I’m not just looking on the side of the roads, I slow down when I pass parking lots. Maybe her car broke down and she managed to make it into a parking lot, I think. And it’s dark now. I’m a mother of 2 small children who have a strict 7:30 bedtime. I have not been on the road at night for quite a while and it’s pretty thrilling but also nerve-wracking because at the end of day I’m searching the city for my mom.
Finally, I get to her house, I turn on her street, I don’t see her car. I’m driving slowly past her house and parked behind this big truck is her car. A sigh of relief. She’s home. I’m thinking I could go inside and say something to her, but I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed that I was so worried about my mom – so worried I scoured the city looking for her – and my friend says, “I would have gotten out of the car and I would have told her I was so worried about you! I was driving up and down the streets looking for you!” I say, “No, no, no. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to embarrass her,” but what I meant is I don’t want to embarrass myself. I was embarrassed by how worried I was. Then my friend says something so poignant. She says, “Well, now we know how they felt when we were gone all hours of the night” and I think oh my god, you’re right.
You have children and people start telling you to soak it all in. “They grow up so fast,” they say. But what I’ve realized is that around the same time our children are “growing up so fast,” so are our parents. And while we’re busy tending, nurturing, and raising our children, trying to soak it all in, our parents are changing too, but you don’t notice until one day when you find yourself searching the city for them. Now you realize that you’re the able-bodied one, you’re the one that can take care of them, you’re the one they call when they need help. They will always think of us as their “babies” but we have to acknowledge that the roles are changing a bit.
The next time I saw my mom I ended up telling her that I drove all over the city looking for her. I thought she’d be embarrassed or sad that I was so worried about her, but she just looked at me and said, “Why didn’t you just check my location from your phone?”
Oh, and why did it take her so long to get home? She was at Target.
Risking Delight 
That’s a good point, and a reason not to focus solely on our children as they grow up. It’s a good idea to stay connected to all of our loved ones, as much as we are able.
LikeLike
Yep, my dad is at that age (plus health-wise) where I’m constantly worrying, especially if he doesn’t pick up the phone or he wanders off etc.
LikeLike