Yes, I still try to visit Mom every day. There are more days I don’t visit than I like to admit – but for the most part, I go.
I visit at least for a little while – sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes an hour.
We sit. We tussle. We talk.
Well, we kinda talk. All semblance of a coherent conversation is gone. I can ask her how her morning went, and the answer may be “Oh, okay”, or it may be “We don’t do that here” or it may be “Terrible – just terrible.”
“What was terrible, Mom?”
“Oh, these people just don’t know how to do it.”
In other words, there is nothing fulfilling in a conversation with Mom. There is no feedback – no interaction. In essence, I just make my mouth move in an effort to say something, but there really isn’t anything to say.
We were going through a long period of silence the other day when something occurred to me. Our Judeo-Christian ethic teaches us that real love is a love where there are no expectations. One person gives with no expectation of getting anything in return.
Well, that’s the ideal, anyway. We seldom do that. We give Christmas presents to other adults in the hope of getting something kewl from them – heck, we give Christmas presents to kids in the hope that we can buy their love.
In a romance, one person will tell the other that they love them unconditionally. But watch carefully – if in time, the person no longer makes the lover happy, the relationship ends. We expect our lover to return love, and when that doesn’t happen, we say the relationship is over. In other words, we expect something in return when we love somebody. We want to be loved too.
I wonder where I will be when Mom is no longer capable of returning love. Right now, she recognizes me the moment I walk into her room. She giggles with delight when we tussle. She returns love. I dread the time when she is no longer able to communicate with me – when she is no longer able to return love.
She is still teaching me lessons – hard lessons. I hope I am man enough to learn them. Can I truly love unconditionally?
