“Hello?”
“Hi, this is Ellen, Margie’s daughter,” I tell the people in Mom’s address book on the phone.
The teachers in my elementary school decorated the social studies teacher’s classroom for his milestone birthday, hanging colorful banners that said, “Lordy, Lordy, Jim Rondash is Forty.”
Learning his first name delights me as much as witnessing such premeditated validation on the part of his peers.
“Yes,” I continue, “I’m calling to let you know I’m planning a surprise party for my mom for her 40th birthday and I’d like you to come to our house for cake,” I tell them, beaming inside because I know how to bake and ice a cake without help.
I mark each invitation acceptance on a sheet of paper and think about how cool it would be to have someone throw me a surprise party for my upcoming birthday.
I will officially be a teenager.
But I won’t remember anyone jumping out or shouting “SURPRISE!” for Mom.
Nothing specific about the grand event that I imagined exists when my brain scans its memory like a browser recalling recently closed tabs.
In my mind’s eye is every Sara Lee cake-in-a-box I ever baked on any given holiday.
The “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee” jingle jives with my often oppositional and always intense emotions.
The bible for a person with borderline personality disorder whose bible is the book “I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me.”
I’m moody. Emotional. Unstable. Erratic. Irrational.
But I’m older now, and I beam with pride as I make the most of every one of my kids’ birthdays.
As “sweet sixteen” has yet to arrive for my eldest, I’m analyzing my life lessons before teaching my children.
Mom lives about two hours away.
She doesn’t call much, and in roughly six-month cycles over the last few years, I’ve overreacted impulsively out of deep fears of rejection and abandonment that stir within me a downward spiral of destructive thinking.
Goddammit why doesn’t she at least call her grandkids?
I’ve done so several times via text, usually around Mother’s Day and her birthday.
Once, I mailed a vague and nondescript birthday card that I signed by hand but didn’t add to its printed message. She returned my passive aggressive gesture three weeks later for my birthday.
This Mother’s Day found me a premenstrual, perimenopausal woman fighting the pull of May’s full “flower” moon on the planet’s oceans and the tides of my emotions.
I relented.
My fingers whipped my iPhone’s keys like waves smashing onto a cold, sand-packed shore as I replied to a text from December, when Mom said she “didn’t have anything if she didn’t have me.”
I had waited months for another text because, you know, if she couldn’t live without me, how was she not dead?
Lashing out in sentences, my messages splattered onto her smartphone screen like blood from whipped skin.
Months of anger built within me like inflammation that caused an itchy rash I couldn’t help but scratch.
“Don’t fucking call me,” I texted without mention of the holiday for moms.
Additional messages borne of frustration landed like bombs, but I stopped at some point.
I haven’t heard from her since July.
One of the skills used in dialectical behavior therapy, the standard of care for highly suicidal people with borderline personality disorder like me, is impulse control.
Radical acceptance, mindfulness and regulating extreme emotional distress are some of the skills I continue to hone daily.
I’m trying to let go; to accept the state of my relationships.
I think about the memories I hold onto with tangible pieces of my past. I keep pictures, clips of hair from high school friends, name tags from fast food jobs and my children’s baby teeth in a black metal box in my closet. It’s a heavy, metal rectangle tackle type box with a solid latch that holds the trinkets and treasures from my whole life.
How do I decide when to delete emails and recycle childhood Christmas cards?
Does moving on mean throwing out the Hallmark card Grandma sent with a five-dollar bill on my fifth birthday?
I am breathing. Self-regulating. Staying in the moment.
I won’t be sending a card or calling this nine nineteen.