S*** My Mom Says

“Honey, are you crying?”

I sigh as I shove the keys to room 418 of Murphy Hall into the keyhole and fumble with the lock while my mom waits with bated breath for my answer.  It is always like this—since second grade, when my teachers sent home concerned letters about my constant crying at school, and fourth grade when my aunt died, while trying to cross a high way in Myrtle Beach—my mom has made it a mission in her life to find the small quaver in my voice, or the tremble of my lower lip and eradicate all the bad things in my life.  It is admirable, and I know that she means well, but after receiving the same worried greeting all through middle school and high school, and now college, the question is old.  I try to regulate my breathing, so I don’t sound like I am sobbing, and not let the frustration seep into my voice when I answer her, “No mom.  I’m not crying.”

I enter my dorm and sling my book bag onto my unmade bed, picking my way through the ungodly mess my roommate made of the room when she did her laundry last night.

            

“You don’t have to snap at me,” she said, and I know she heard it—that teeny bit of anger that I always have when I talk to her.  Compared to when I was in high school, that caustic hostility I always associated with thoughts of my mother has faded into white noise in my subconscious, but I guess old habits die hard.   Resentment is hard to kill, and as childish as it is to think that my mom and her affair is the reason my parents divorced, there is always going to be a nasty little whisper in my head to contend with.

            

“I know, mom,” I say as I sit at my desk, staring out the window while white snow tumbles to the ground outside.  “I’m sorry.”  I meant it, too— for everything.  I was sorry for hating her in high school, and blaming the failure of my parent’s tail spinning marriage on her.  I was sorry for the time’s I had screamed at her, and slammed the door in her face.  And I was mostly sorry for never wanting to be like her.

            

“I was only trying to help,” she sniffs daintily into the phone, and as much as I want to disagree with her—I can’t; helping is all she ever tries to do.  If I had to choose the kind of mother I would want to be like in the future, I suppose it would be like her-- hopefully wiser.

            

“I know, mom.  I have to go, but I will talk to you later.” 

I hang up the phone.