I have called my mother most Sundays for as long as I can remember. She is 73. She worked for her school district for close to thirty years, a secretary, then an administrative professional, then whatever title was accurate when she finally retired in 2022, and she tells me she is perfectly fine. I believe her. I also know that is the same thing she would say if she weren’t.
I have called her eleven Sundays since April 23. I have said some version of “fine” at every one.
There is a public record of this plan that my mother has not read. Seventy-five days of it, most mornings, working through something I have not described to her directly. A stranger emailed me about it in June. My seventeen-year-old found it on her phone and mentioned it on a Saturday night as she was on her way to bed. Twenty-three days in one column, fifteen in another, both numbers I check first thing in the morning. My mother does not know any of these numbers exist.
I have been asking myself why, and I have a few answers that feel partially true.
The first is logically defensible. There is nothing specific to tell her yet. No announcement made. Nothing signed. I have sent two emails and I am waiting. Telling her now would mean alarming someone about a plan that is still in motion, and that seems unkind. This answer holds up under questioning.
The second is about how she would hear it. She grew up watching money be uncertain. She has an understanding of what a salary and a title and twenty-four years at one type of company mean that is not abstract to her the way it is sometimes abstract to me. Some of what she taught me, without ever saying it directly, is: you do not lay down something solid until you have something solid to stand on. Telling her I am planning to lay something down would require me to also explain where I am landing, and the landing is still being arranged.
The third reason is the one I keep not finishing.
She did a version of this too. Not leaving, staying. She stayed for a long time at a job she was good at and never told me, when I was growing up, whether she had ever wanted something else. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe the job was genuinely fine and the garden club is genuinely fine and that is a complete life. I want to be careful about projecting my situation onto a different person who made different choices for her own reasons.
But I asked her once, in my late twenties, whether she had ever thought about going back to school. She said she had thought about it. She said she had looked into it once. The timing had never been right. She said all of this in the voice of someone who had finished with a question, not someone who still had it. I was 28 when she gave that answer. I am 49 now. I have been thinking about what she meant by “the timing” more than usual lately.
I think the third reason is this: I am afraid of what I look like from her version of me.
She has a version of me that made the thing work. Degree, job, house, years of effort in a particular direction. She is proud of it in the quiet way parents are proud of things that cost their kids real work. I am planning to walk away from what that version of me built, and I do not yet know how to explain that the walking-away is not a failure but a choice. Those two explanations sound similar until they don’t. I have not figured out how to make them sound different yet.
She will find out. I am not keeping this from her indefinitely. I am waiting until there is something real and specific to say, which is the version of the reason I can defend when I say it out loud.
This morning the inbox number was the same. I have been checking it less, or noticing the check less. Twenty-two days left in July.
She will probably call this week about something else, and ask how work is, and I will say something true and incomplete, which is the same thing I have been doing for eleven Sundays.