He got defensive when I told him he worked too many weekends.
Once, he spent an entire frustrating Friday evening assembling a heavy IKEA bookshelf backward and refused to look at the manual.
He wasn’t a knight in shining armor.
Thank God.
I had stopped trusting fairy tales where one good person arrives and magically fixes all your trauma.
News about Khloe occasionally filtered through the family grapevine.
She was apparently doing very well at her corporate job in Texas.
She bought a nice downtown apartment.
She started casually dating someone new and then abruptly stopped.
My mother flew out to visit her once and came home complaining bitterly to Aunt Susan that Khloe had been too busy with friends and work to spend enough quality time with her.
When I heard that, the irony was so predictable that I actually laughed out loud in my car.
For a long time, I wondered whether my mother would eventually find a way around the phone block.
She didn’t.
Maybe she finally understood I was serious.
Maybe she decided I was too cruel and stubborn to bother with.
Maybe Khloe became emotionally available again and my mother no longer needed me.
Eventually, I stopped trying to solve the puzzle of her motives.
I also realized something surprising.
I still missed my mother sometimes.
That realization made me incredibly angry at first.
I thought missing her meant I was weak.
Or that some secret part of me wanted to return to the relationship.
It didn’t.
I missed pieces of her.
I missed the mother who brought me hot chicken soup and stroked my hair when I had the flu as a child.
I missed the way she laughed so hard at certain terrible jokes that she couldn’t finish the punchline.
I missed the universal comfort of having a mother I could call when I didn’t know how to roast a turkey.
Even though the actual experience of calling her had almost always ended with me hurting.
You can deeply miss somebody and still logically know that giving them access to your life is dangerous for both of you.
It took me an embarrassingly long time and a lot of therapy to accept that.
One evening, years after the pregnancy post that had kicked off that final round of chaos, I stood in my kitchen again.
Different season.
Different year.
Same granite counter.
Maya, now an incredibly stubborn toddler, sat on the floor passionately trying to convince Leo that a plastic mixing spoon absolutely belonged inside his school backpack.
Leo pretended to be furious, scowling at her while obviously encouraging the behavior by leaving the backpack unzipped.
Marcus stood at the sink rinsing dinner dishes and mildly telling both children to stop putting random kitchen objects into school supplies.
I was exhausted.
My feet hurt.
Crushed cracker crumbs covered the floor beneath the dining table.
A huge basket of clean laundry had been sitting in the hallway for three days because apparently we had silently agreed it was now part of the furniture.
I had an annoying budget meeting at the clinic the next morning.
I had no idea what I was going to make for dinner the following night.
It wasn’t an Instagram-perfect life.