What kind of mother am I? The over-the-top kind that never misses an opportunity to say I love you. Any excuse to show feeling because it’s not obvious to a child, the beating heart of child-rearing; they can miss it. A young person brought a sorrow to me recently, they said why don’t they care? I said they do, they don’t know how to show it. Earlier this year I was sent a package that expressed my father's love in a folder of addresses I’d forgotten, a writing down of every mountain shack and beach house I’d lived in all over the world, and it spoke of his care in a way that I hadn’t comprehended at the time. Until I held those pieces of paper in my hand, the evidence, his handwriting, scraps torn off the back of envelopes, a post box number written hurriedly, I imagined the telephone pinned between shoulder and ear, I hadn’t known he’d even noticed that I’d gone. And yesterday the same thing happened for my mother. A cousin was going through an ancient box and wrote to me, an email Just found this! A report of a conversation between our mothers, detailing a moment I had disappeared in India, there’d been an earthquake, I hadn’t been in touch, my mother’s sleepless nights, uncontrollable fears. Who knew? Not me who was high kicking it around the Western Ghats oblivious, or on a motorbike struggling with wet ropes in the rain. Who never heard her say I’m frightened. I didn’t phone home for a year. Imagine. The torment. And now I don’t have to because I’m in her shoes, my son is two a half thousand miles east of here in a school used to war where bombs are falling from Azerbaijan onto Nagorno-Karabakh. And although he’s safe in a school with a bunker where three years ago pupils upped sticks for Yerevan to learn in real time the politics of war, and although I tell him every time we speak, I love you, I still want to wrap my arms around him and can’t and this is what my mother felt and couldn’t, or even send a text or funny video or hear my voice in messages sent last week. I didn’t know her heart had bled. I’ll go and see her. Apologise.
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Redemption arks be like
I often wonder what my parents were actually thinking of me. Mum's not good with apologies. Shell just say, see, you should be like me.