Mother's Day Gift

[mallorys_camera]

RTT sent me a Kindle book for Mother's Day: The Best American Essays 2012.

This made me bawl like a baby.

There are two books I read religiously every year, and have been reading every year since times immemorial: The Best American Short Stories [your year goes here] and The Best American Essays [ditto].

And I thought: Wow, he remembered...

It does make me really sad that he and I aren't closer. I keep remembering my relationship with my own crazy mother, how overjoyed I was to get out from under her reach in a final, irretrievable way and thinking, Well, of course he feels the same way…

Except… I wasn't crazy.

Or was I?

I was pretty miserable that last year in Ithaca and of course, he knew it, although I wasn't nearly as miserable as I was that first year after Ben abandoned us and I was left all alone in a place where I had no roots, no support system, no reason for being except this thought in the back of my mind that I had to get RTT out of Monterey, that if RTT stayed in Monterey, he was going down…

And we had major, major battles that last year. My memory is that the battles were always about forcing him to go to school when he didn't want to. When he was lying in bed, moaning that he didn't feel well, and I would scream and rail, "Well, you are going to school, Goddamit!"

His memories may be of very different battles, and it's quite possible those battles took place too. I have a really spotty, unreliable memory for the day-by-day.

What always hung over me was the fact that really, I didn't want to be there. And at a certain point, under the tutelage of the dour and humorless Jayne LeGro, Ben had done another one of his chameleon-like personality changes and was now prepared to be a responsible parent… After they moved from Freeville to Trumansburg, I was toast. Since Jayne LeGro was paying the lion's share of the bills in that household, there was just generally a sense of more security, more cash flow. They had furniture! I didn't. (Why should I buy furniture when (a) I had no money and (b) I had furniture; it was just in a storage unit in California.) Plus there were lots of other kids in Trumansburg, a regular posse for RTT to accumulate around him. He was/is/always will be such a charismatic personality.

He's doing extraordinarily well now. Just finished his freshman year in SUNY's Environmental Sciences Program at Syracuse with great grades. Has lined up a counselor job at Hidden Valley for the summer.

Justin's suicide is still a major touchstone. I suspect he feels guilty. Like if he had been around to answer that phone…

Justin used to call him multiple times a day in Ithaca, starting at 7:30 A.M. in the morning as I was taking him down the hill to school and finishing up in the wee hours of the morning. I never quite understood that aspect of their friendship, Justin's emotional dependency, because in all other contexts, RTT hated it when people became dependent upon him.

Jonathan and David.

Achilles and Patroclus.

Anyway.

I was pleased and thrilled to get his Mother's Day remembrance. It's been a tough week though that has to do more with the fact that I've become the repository for several other people's sad secrets than with anything that's going on in my own life. My own life right now is placid, pleasant, more or less uneventful.

It destroys me that I can't do more to help the people I care about.

But honestly, I've got to focus on my own oxygen mask.

And the cats' oxygen masks, of course!