One more day of March, and then it’s here.
April. If I had to describe the month in terms of taste, I would say it’s like eating an orange right after you’ve brushed you teeth; it’s bittersweet. And unlike being able to just acknowledge how dumb it was to eat an orange after I just brushed my teeth, I don’t get a choice on this one. There’s not something I can change or avoid doing that’s going to take away the bitter and just leave me with the sweet.
April brings me back to 27 years worth of happy memories spent with my mom. It was always the first true sign of spring in Pennsylvania (Thanks, first winter back home, for reminding me that March is a giant tease), and the month in which we always celebrated ourselves together, with our birthdays falling exactly a week apart (and, you know, a few years.) I think back to Aprils in which we went to Florida, or in later years, when she would visit me there.
With each passing year, April always marked the progression of our mother-daughter relationship. In earlier years, I guess it was probably the difference between baby gibberish and actually being able to communicate in word form back and forth. Then several years later, the difference between me kicking in her windshield when she told me I couldn’t have a pet rabbit, and dealing with my frustrations in a more productive and less expensive manner, like throwing a hairbrush at Neal’s face. But my favorite was the evolution of our relationship into my twenties, when we became the best of friends in addition to being mother and daughter. The age gap started to close in, and we were suddenly two adults sharing our stories and navigating the world together.
It was then that I really met and got to know my mom as the friend and the woman that she was beyond “just” being my mom. I saw her vulnerabilities and I started to understand things about her childhood and upbringing—as well as my own—that I was too young to understand before. She’d open her entire heart up to me about everything that was breaking it at the time, and I’d remind her she was perfect on her own and she needed to recognize her own value and be content with being on her own. She’d tell me I was so much smarter than she ever was about relationships and sometimes life in general. But the truth was, I just hadn’t been tested yet at that point. I hadn’t yet experienced what it was like to be so in love with someone that you just couldn’t walk away from them and throw in the towel, even though it was the right and necessary thing to do. I hadn’t yet experienced making myself completely vulnerable to someone and then getting my heart shattered, only to go back for more. I hadn’t yet been in a situation where I somehow tied my own self worth around what someone else thought of me, because I thought they were all that mattered. But when I did? Damn, did I miss my best friend and my mom simultaneously, and damn did I want to call her and say “I understand it now, but please just make it better.”
Our relationship was special and it was profound and it was so many other things, but my favorite part about it was that it was so incredibly fun. It was years of me getting playfully made fun of for misreading the word “guitar” as “guter”, because THAT’S WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE. It was skinny dipping at night in family pools and on one occasion, at Whipple’s Dam. It was flaring our nostrils at each other because it always made her laugh. It was me wakeboarding while she skied right next to me off the back of her boat. It was blowing up a giant rowboat and paddling out in Clearwater bay to see dolphins, only to get stuck rowing against the wind and have to be towed in by a friendly yet somewhat odd gentleman sunbathing nude off one of the islands. It was meeting her at the Arena for her traditional Tuesday beverage and cigarette when I was home. And it was finally going on a “bar crawl” on Main Street in Dunedin, where we played darts and laughed hysterically, planning the next five years when she’d move to Florida and we’d start our own shuttle service (that was her idea, I was just along for the ride....get it??) She talked about the possibility of trying to buy my grandmother’s condo, because that charming little town had become so meaningful to us, and a place full of so many memories. Ironically, it was our last adventure I can remember, and there we were, talking about the future together—a future with more adventures—that just wasn’t in the cards for us.
And while her birthday is extraordinarily difficult to celebrate without her here, I think I may actually struggle more on my own birthday (especially now that BOTH of the people who gave me a birthday are gone.) It’s a day on which the absence of my 12:25am birthday call is felt to my core, and when I’m reminded that I’ll never get another off-key Happy Birthday song from her again. Neal summed it up really well on his first birthday without them both: our parents had many birthdays before we came into the picture, but we are just getting used to having our own birthdays without them. If it’s even something anyone can really get used to.
Despite all of the memories that may make me sad to think about now, April still holds so much happiness for me, and it still makes me feel closer to her.
April may never be the “perfect” month again, but it will always be ours.
