In Which We Consider Whether My Mother Could Still Be Described As "Post Partum"

Remember how in Peanuts, Charlie Brown (or maybe it was Linus) would get "Post-Christmas Letdown?" I have Post-Vacation Letdown. PVL is exacerbated by factors related to the ongoing plight of the only child.

Now that I am out of the Asian Death Glare years, time with my mother tends to be taken up in large part by her stroking my arm, squeezing my wrist, or offering to pay for things that, in normal life, I pay for myself, like gas and coffee and really anything else she sees me looking at when she's with me.

I totally get that she misses me, and try to keep the eye-rolling to a minimum, and have my wrist available to her at regular intervals for squeezing. It's important to know that, before last week, her last squeezing opportunity was a mere three weeks previous.

But. Since the January I left the 'rents to return to graduate school after winter break, my mom has cried every time she says goodbye to me before I leave for the airport (she used to cry in the airport, but now that everyone is a terrorist suspect and can't come to the departure gate without a boarding pass, she has to cry before I get in the car to leave for the airport). It's not sobbing crying. It's stoic Asian crying - where she's unable to speak clearly and her eyes are all wet.

I was watching the second dvd of “John Adams” last night and let me just say that Abigail Adams, sending her little boy off on a dangerous sea voyage across the North Atlantic during the Revolutionary War, to live in a foreign country for an unspecified number of years, during which time he might variously be: hit by a cannonball in a sea attack and/or contract and die of yellow fever and also during which time span she would be functionally out of all communication with him, was only marginally more upset than my mother as I was getting in the car at the Hilton to drive 15 minutes to the airport, after which time she could call me on the cellphone.

My friend says that she totally understands this because, having recently given birth to a daughter, she understands that the emotions are all wackadoo post partum.

My mom is 66 years old. I don't know if this reasonably still counts as post partum behavior changes.

And while I was gone? The Trouble House neighbor put her construction garbage in my collection bin. I am not having that.

--saifun