On being friends with my mother.

I haven't really felt compelled to write anything lately, but I seem to be awake far earlier than normal on a Sunday (you can thank the copious amounts of PBR I drank last night that had me in bed by 9)

I haven't slept so well the rest of the week. On Thursday night, I received a text message from my mother that said something along the lines of "l l olive you", which I assumed was a product of drunkenness or her inability to operate a smart phone. I didn't think anything of it, until I received four phone calls in a row from her number.

I finally pick up.

"Yes?"

"I just wanted to talk and apologize for my phone"

"Mom, it's 12:30 here. I'm getting up in five hours. Can we do this later?"

"I am not going to take this abuse from you"

So naturally I hung up the phone. She's tried to call me several more times this week. And I just can't bring myself to speak to her. It's been bothering me for days.

When something good happens to most women my age, they want to tell their mothers. I tell my father. My success, my failures, my hopes and dreams...I bring those to my dad. My knight in shining armor who let me rescue myself from a bad situation when I was 14 by moving in with him.

It has recently dawned on me that my mother knows nothing about who I am as a person. I haven't seen her since I was twenty. We talk about two or three times a year, but I talk about her more.

I talk about how many times we moved when I was a kid, and about her new husband, and about her alcoholism. I talk about the pressure I felt to be thin and beautiful, when I never heard from her that I was. I talk about the crushing depression and anxiety I experienced living in a home with her. I talk about all of these things with other people, but never with my mother.

She asked me last summer if I thought she was a bad parent and I said no. I said she did what she could with what she was given.

Sitting at my grandmother's kitchen table this summer in the sleepy Northern Michigan town I grew up in, I realized I know just as little about my mother as she does me. I held wedding pictures and pictures from pageants, pictures from family events and school picture day, and felt no connection to this woman who birthed me.

How is it possible to love someone so deeply and not know them?

I know that I love my mother. I love the memories of her doing her hair, singing Whitney Houston, taking us to thrift stores. Sometimes she was really there. She was really Mom to me a handful of times, and that's what makes this sensation so strange.

My mother has liver cirrhosis and it is going to drastically shorten her life, and I don't know how I will react when she dies. I don't know how sad I'll be. I don't know if I would even make it to her funeral, as she lives in California. I don't know how she lives her life. I don't know what she even looks like anymore. I don't know if she still uses Eucerin ointment on her lips because they crack so badly, or if she still insists on curling her hair because it is so naturally straight. I don't know if she is so zoned out on pain medicine and booze that the real Nicole Goodreau even exists anymore.

And so people tell me to reach out to her.

"Why don't you just call her?"

Because every time I call her, I feel terribly about myself afterward. Because every time I call her, I miss having a mother. I feel guilty for being so absent. I feel guilty for not visiting her and her husband. I feel like a terrible daughter. I am a terrible daughter.

But mostly, I have nothing to say.

At this point, forcing a relationship between my mother and myself would be dishonest. I am not at all the scared fourteen year old who left her house. I figured out the hair thing. I figured out the makeup thing. I am active and I try to be strong. I try to be smart. I graduated with two majors in five years while working full time at a ceremony she did not even attend.

I don't know how to talk to her. I don't know how to involve her in my life the way I've involved everyone else. I don't know what to say.

So I ignore her phone calls and let the relationship decay a little more every day, because I don't know what to do.

I don't feel like I am her daughter anymore.

Thankfuly, I have a fantastic father and stepmother who I love to pieces. I have the grandmother who essentially raised me. I have the friend's mothers who have seen me grow up and still think to ask about me. Aunts and uncles who have welcomed me into their homes even when they don't agree with my life choices. And finally, the best sisters a girl could ever ask for. That being said.

I miss my mother. But no amount of conversation or effort will bring back the mother I miss.