I am not an aging mom but I am a child of an aging mother. My mother is 90 – but she thinks she's about 45! We talk on the phone at least once a day and do a lot of laughing and simply enjoy each other. A few years ago, I got her to move closer to us after living across the country from her for so long. I just saw her today on Christmas and we just got home. She knows most of what goes on in my life except intimate details. The only time I ever kept anything big from her was when I had a suspicious lump discovered in a mammogram and I had to have a lumpectomy in the hospital. She was already living nearby but I kept it from her somehow. I did not tell her until I got the results back which showed that the tissue was benign. There isn't anything important that I don't tell her. But a lot of that is a credit to her and doesn't reflect on me at all. She's been her children's best cheerleader, also good at drawing boundaries, and she made us leave the nest by saying she would only pay for college if we went away, because "a big part of the college experience involves learning to live away from home," she said. I only realized years later that she cried a lot and was terribly depressed when I went to college!
She has never been a helicopter parent. And yet she's always been involved and interested and made time for her children. She's just very open and uncomplicated in her way. I don't know how to explain that. She doesn't play mental games or emotional games. She's an adult. So it's easy to interact with her and just be myself. I have friends who have complicated relationships with their mothers because their mothers try to intrude in their lives or try to make the children feel guilty for things. Those friends, some whom I have known since junior high, seem to be the ones who were keeping things from their mothers. Because Mother has never intruded or prodded or tried to lasso me with guilt, she has never pushed me away. So I just naturally I'm drawn TO her. She's one of the most important people in my life. She and my husband are my best friends. I am 66 and so very very lucky to have her. She still lives in her own home and drives her car. (An auto racing fan, she was stopped for speeding in her convertible last summer, after which she bought a T-shirt that reads, "I'm not speeding. I'm qualifying.") She makes me laugh, but I worry about her constantly at this age. I am one lucky daughter, that's for sure.
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