When You’re Gone

You know when you take a vacation and it’s so complete – so separate from your regular life – that you forget what happened before it, even how long it has been since you were home? It sounds, when I write that, like I had the kind of Awesome Vacation that frat boys take to Vegas, the kind where you take your own karaoke machine and drink gin and tonics in your hotel room till noon the next day but really I am speaking of our small, four-day vacation to Burnaby and subsequent return to our house in the Mizzle yesterday.

I came back and I looked at my last post here and it was 9 days ago! 9 days. I mean. I’m not on *hiatus* or anything.

Saint Aardvark’s parents are in town. They like to stay with us because we house their grandchildren, but at the time of flight bookings many months ago we were desperately tired and not optimistic about sleep training so we didn’t think moving our two children into the same bedroom to free up the guest room would be a best interests kind of thing.

My parents went to Scotland almost two weeks ago. They come back today. Their house in Burnaby is big enough for all of us to spend time in and also has a yard and also a strawberry patch.

Oh it’s fine, stay here, said my parents to SA’s parents. They get along. It is so convenient.

On Friday, the children and I packed everything into the car and drove the 20 minutes to my parents’ house. Grandma and Grandad arrived. And we all stayed there, together, until yesterday morning, eating pancakes and strawberries and bread and spaghetti and generally enjoying ourselves immensely.

My parents’ house is my old house, the house where I lived from age 2 – 19. So I am comfortable there, and happy and familiar. But usually I am there with my parents around. I know where the scotch tape is but I don’t go digging for it, I ask about it first. And we always, unless it is Christmas Eve, leave at the end of the day.

It is a strange thing to be in your mother’s house * when she is not there. To touch all the cutlery and the tea towels and look out the window over the sink and feel the history in the gaze, how she must have looked out over the yard when I was small, bigger, biggest, and now when we arrive with our two kids in tow. Washing clothes in her machine and hanging them on the line in the basement to dry. Wiping the kitchen table with a damp cloth. Waking up in that house again, hearing the birds chattering and the slap of running shoes on the sidewalk.

It was eerie, in a way. It was like she was gone. You know. Dead.**

And when you think things like that in your mother’s house while she is who-knows-where on another continent, it’s easy to get into a loop. This is what it will look like one day. One day she will be gone and he will be gone and all of this will be left exactly as it was that day, the day before they were gone. Thanks, creepy brain! That’s what I need to think about at 2 am while I lie in the most uncomfortable bed in the universe! (except for the hideabed at that old house where all those guys used to live. Yes, the Iron Maiden, that’s what I’m thinking of.)

In the dark of nightmorning, panic rising in my throat. But she can’t ever die. I need her. Followed by the devastating: but she will. And someday I will be the mom. And someday after that I will die. And my children will stand as adults in my kitchen, wondering what I saw when I looked out the window.

Believe it or not, these kinds of things don’t occur to me very often.

But. It’s just as easy to push those thoughts aside when you are surrounded by family and strawberries and the occasional sunbeam. Cross that bridge when we come to it, won’t we, says the soothing, sensible, Mary Poppins-like voice in my head. I suppose we will.

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* Yes it is my father’s house too, but I specify my mother here because my father’s domain is the garage (and the garden) and I don’t spend much time there at all. I went in a couple of weeks ago looking for a scrub brush and actually got lost for about 10 minutes. A very organized filing system I’m sure.

** Because doesn’t everyone want to come home from a vacation and read about her eventual demise on her daughter’s blog? Definitely. ***

*** I mean, not that it will be a surprise to my mom that she will die someday but it’s not something we mention in polite company, is it? ****

**** Does the Internet still count as polite company? A topic for a different day.