Six of cups, and the two people you are talking to

MONDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER

mid september, and the year has that back to school feeling whether or not anybody in your house is going anywhere. bodies remember this month. the pencil cases, the shoes, the particular monday morning noise of it.

the six of cups is memory, and what it does to a mother is quite specific. you are in a relationship with two people at once. there is the adult who answers the phone, and there is the eight year old, and the second one has never left the room.

that is not sentimentality and it is not something to correct. it is simply how love of that length gets stored. the only difficulty is that the eight year old needed things the adult does not, and the habits built for the first one keep turning up in conversations with the second.

so today is a good day to notice which of them you are talking to. most of the friction between mothers and grown children lives exactly there, and almost none of it is about whatever is being discussed.

what is worth leaning into today: the memory itself. you are allowed to miss the small version of somebody who is alive and well and thirty four.

what is worth staying away from: advice that would have been right in 1998. if it arrives automatically, it is probably addressed to the wrong person.

my advice for today: ask one question today that you would ask a friend rather than a child. how is that going, what do you make of it, no follow up and no solving. people notice being addressed as adults, even when they could not tell you what changed.

how old are they in your head, before you stop and work out the real number. mine is always younger than the answer. tell me yours.

/ a reflection

on being remembered as you were

i have been thinking about the other direction of this, which gets far less attention. they are doing it to you as well.

the version of you your children carry is roughly the woman you were when they were fifteen. tireder, sharper, more frightened about money, less finished. that is the mother they argue with in their heads, and quite often the one they are answering on the phone.

which means some of what comes back at you is addressed to somebody who no longer exists. not all of it, and this is not a way of waving off anything real they have to say. but some of it, and knowing that takes a surprising amount of sting out of a bad call.

the update happens slowly and mostly by accident. it happens when they watch you do something that does not fit the file. take a class, change your mind about something large, say plainly that you were wrong about a thing you were loud about. none of that is a strategy and all of it works better than explaining.

i think most of us would like to be known as we are now rather than as we were at our most stretched. that goes both ways in a family, and it is worth having in mind on a monday when the phone call does not go well.

what would you want updated in their file on you. reply and tell me the one thing.