Capturing Water

Once again my daughter calls angry. This time it is about a tax refund she couldn’t get a couple of years ago because she was told someone else had claimed her. She believes I did this. A time before that, she was angry because I had said, in response to her saying she was going to buy a car from someone she just met that “she needed to make this decision.” A couple of other times it was something else I either did or did not do. Trying to love someone with mental illness is like trying to hold water in your hand. Even so, sometimes that love is a like wave that washes over you, and you are so stunned by the intensity, you forget to try and capture it. Sometimes that love is like the foamy sea after it breaks, its bubbles providing an illusion that you can hold it longer. Very rarely is it a faucet in which you can hold it if you cup your hands just right, for at least a few seconds before it drips away. Rarer still are the times when you feel as though you share a cup. As her mother, I still try. I can’t help but see the brilliant artist, remember the witty observations or just the quiet times when she fell asleep in my arms. I can only sit with my sadness. Just recently I read a quote that said that grief lives in the space between expectations and reality. True to pattern, after an angry text, I am cut off from her social media, my back door to seeing in on her life in another city. As my partner reminds me, she’ll reach out again at some point. We just don’t know when. So I inhabit this space between expectation and reality. Hoping the gap isn’t too big or lasts too long.