I was packing the other day, rummaging through the far corners of the linen closet (okay, our place is tiny, it’s the everything closet), and I stumbled across a blanket that my mom made sometime in the year before she died.  I wish I could remember why she gave it to me.  I wish it had something to do with wanting to make something for her first grandbaby and that she knew that he would be a boy, hence the blue around the edges.  I wish it was created with that much intentionality, much like I wish she’d left me letters or voice recordings for different times during my life.  But I don’t think it was.  It might have simply been her first blanket finished that she felt wasn’t good enough to give away at a shower.  Whatever the case, I’m glad that I found it and glad that the edges are blue, even though I’m sure when she gave it to me I wondered what I’d do with a small blanket in those colors.

I also looked again at my mom’s sort-of-journal that she kept while she was pregnant with me.  It’s woefully lacking in details and information but I thought it was funny to find that she’d noted middle back pain on the right side two months before I was born.  It sounds like the same place Clint keeps massaging trying to get rid of whatever it is that makes the spot ache so badly. 

The ties and connections are so pitifully small.  I never thought that this would be the extent of my mom’s involvement in my first pregnancy.  If anything, I would have expected her to be over-involved, that I would hang up the phone in annoyance and remind anyone around that this was my pregnancy.

I miss her.  Today was her birthday and the last time I saw her, two years ago.  I can hardly believe that much time has passed and so many things have changed.  The landscape of life is different in countless ways, there has been so much growth and change.  Sometimes I hardly recognize myself and I wonder what she would think of it all.  The missing and the ache change but they don’t go away.

And I don’t think that I’d want them to.