Connection

Trifecta: Week 103

Remember (verb):
1 :  to bring to mind or think of again <remembers the old days>
2 :  archaic
a :  BETHINK
b :  REMIND
3a :  to keep in mind for attention or consideration <remembers friends at Christmas>
b :  REWARD <was remembered in the will>
4 :  to retain in the memory
5 :  to convey greetings from <remember me to her>

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She had not seen her mother for most of her adult life. Distance or death would be the only two scenarios that could wedge that long of a time gap between two people in a well-adjusted family, and neither were the cause of this case nor was this a well-adjusted family. It’s just how things were; a connection to her family had always been on a continual back-burner. It never existed prior, was mostly volatile, and caused her to disappear into the world with an insatiable thirst for freedom.

Her life up until legal adulthood had largely been spent in a metaphorical bubble, one of sterility and over-zealous protection largely by her mother aiming to please her mother — a vicious cycle of paranoid parenting. If you so much as kissed a boy, you were on the way to becoming a slut. If you went to a rock show with friends you would succumb to peer pressure and do drugs. If you started reading mystery novels, you would turn into a serial killer or hide bombs in your school’s cafeteria. The world was always too corrupt and she was deemed to have too weak of a mind and personality by her mother and her mother’s mother to be allowed to test her decision-making skills.

So, when she was legally free, she fled. She traveled in modern-day hippie caravans across country, breathing in and out the fresh pine to heal her city-coated lungs while talking young philosophy with strangers and one good friend. She joined the Army, met up with those same friends years later and shouted at them — they knew nothing about the world beyond their own hazy, smoke-filled lives. She lost those friends. She moved to Europe and drank rich wine while studying art.

Her mother still sent her care-packages to base camp and she sent her mother chocolate from Brussels. They were connected, but never spoke. They were too different, but her mother still remembered.