It is 825 miles from my house in Loveland, Colorado to my mom’s in Marion, Iowa. I have not seen her for seven years. My last visit ended badly. I stopped in for my scheduled visit before leaving town but she wasn’t home. A friend had taken her gambling. Feeling rejected and abandoned by my mom, I left in tears, vowing to never speak to or see her again.
I finally decided to reach out to my mom in 2016 during the presidential election as she always followed politics and so have I. Pretending to be a pollster, I nervously called and asked her who she was going to vote for in the upcoming election.
She laughed; I had her. We did not speak about my previous visit and we have talked on the phone every month or so since.
In 2017, my mom fell at her home and was hospitalized after a neighbor found her a couple of days later. She doesn’t remember being in the hospital. Rehab followed and then she returned home. Since then she has fallen several times. She gingerly walks with a cane and if she falls she needs help getting up, but she still drives.
Apprehensive about making the drive after what happened last time, I recently visited my mom as I felt I needed to check on her wellbeing. She had isolated herself from most of the family and she had very few friends. Just in case things didn’t work out during my visit, I put together an alternative plan to visit friends.
I knocked on the door of her home. She answered this time, smiling and welcoming. Relief. This scheduled visit would be different.
My mom was guarded but open about her life. She began by describing all the times she had fallen in the past two years. The most recent incident took place about two weeks before my arrival. She had fallen after getting out of bed in the morning and could not get herself back up. There were construction workers working on a shed across the street so she crawled over to the front door, opened it and tapped her cane on the storm door in between their hammering until they heard her. They came over and helped her up.
I listened intently to her stories. Then frustrated I asked, “Didn’t one of your daughters send you an alarm system a year ago which would alert a neighbor if you could not get up?” She answered, “Yes, you did.” I asked her where the alarm was and she said a neighbor had taken it home, but she didn’t think it would work. I also told her she was lucky to live in a safe Iowa town. This situation leaves her vulnerable to theft or sexual assault.
During our visits over that weekend we talked, reworked her overloaded extension cords, packed up some of her belongings she wanted me to have, moved some items to make it safer for her to walk around, cleaned up her house plants by removing dead leaves, and set up that alarm system I sent her last year. It did work over at the neighbor’s house. Halleluia! She also drove me around the little farming community of Whittier where I lived until the second grade.
On my last day with her, I brought Angry Orchard Hard Cider. I wanted to toast her 85th birthday which occurred in August. She only drank half a bottle because she said it made her feel a bit woozy.
As I drove away that last evening, she smiled and waved from the driveway. Surprised by my overwhelming emotion, I waved back through tears. Not tears of rejection and abandonment, but sweet tears of joy and love for the good visit home. The precious time I spent with my mom and forgiveness.