Hello Darkness My Old Friend

I have sent a card – A funny one to avoid any gooey sentiments that are only marginally genuine.

I have sent a gift. Nothing bright and shiny and permanent like a pendant or earrings. A basket of scrumptious breakfast goodies that will be gone and forgotten in weeks if that is the gate we choose to swing on.

And now I am calling. Rules are rules. However complicated.

I am one ring into the call and looking frantically around the house for a paper bag to breathe into. All I have is plastic, which may actually have an appeal once the call gets underway.

Two ringy dingy.

I am wishing I had *67-ed the call so as to have my caller ID scrambled. Dammit.

One more ring and she picks up.

“Hello?”

“Happy Mothers Day, Ma,” I say.

“Liza!” she says.

And then, as if to proactively avoid any space in which an “I’m sorry” might be muttered, or more importantly, not offered, she launches into a typical speech beginning with “You know what I wanted to tell you?” and followed by run on sentences strung end to end to weave a convoluted one-sided conversation covering 11 different topics and ending with “How are YOU?”

And when I reply however meekly that I am sitting on the sofa with my daughter Hilary, before I can tell her what we are doing, she asks to talk to her.

And from several sofa cushions away I can hear every word of the voluminous grandmotherly advice being offered that has clearly been saved up and ruminated about for months while Mom and Grandmom were feuding.

The voice is exuberant and grating.

Hil is looking at me as though she is plotting my imminent torture and eventual death. By knitting needle or something similarly wretched.

As soon as Grandmom has taken a long awaited and long anticipated breath, my child wedges in a quick and artful “Happy Mothers Day I have to go to the bathroom” and in throwing the heated phone receiver in my general direction hisses, “How come Patrick doesn’t have to talk to her? And shoots me the hairy eyeball of doom.

I am back on the phone, and alone in the room. Nowhere to hide.

“So Liza, tell me….”

I am willing myself to die.