Dear Talia, here is your 50th birthday card

You are cute and tough and unfussy and strong and opinionated and beautiful and adventurous and well traveled and a great friend and you smell good and you party and you like to drive and you photograph well and your attractive children look like you. Also, you are an eater and a reader and an athlete and brave. You are good with babies and you are adorable and you are warm in bed and and you know what you like and you are not unwilling to look foolish and you are a good daughter-in-law. You are loyal and a very good parent and you are ridiculously popular and I love your smile and you have excellent taste in clothes and know what metadata is. You can carry a lot and you mix a good martini and are not afraid to get your hands dirty and you have great feet and you make eye contact and you do more than your fair share and don't even get me started about your figure. And you are tolerant to a point and you dance and you love to camp and you will go anywhere and you are cool and know interesting people and you are aging beautifully and you think for yourself and you love to cook and are good at it. Most important, and most you, you have the biggest biggest heart. The proof is right here: in hundreds of pictures there is love in your eyes. I can blog and one day may even say it: I am so grateful to have you as my partner in this life and to have already had so many years with you. Happy Birthday, wonderful you.

Mother love

 

My mother loved me. That is a central fact of my life and, I hope, of yours: a parent's love, perhaps even two. 

My mother was also a source of great irritation to me. I love my children. I am also a source of great irritation to them. Irritation is an inevitable side effect of being close--we are none of us perfectly smooth. But the irritation a child feels toward a parent is, I think, often a direct product of the parent's love, of having someone else care as much or even more than you yourself do about your successes and your failures, about your actions and decisions, about your hurts and healing. It is deeply intrusive, thus, again, irritating.

Irritation demands a response. Many children respond to the irritation of a parent's love by taking space from it, or trying to. It is part of what makes the teen years so fractious: the desire to take space is there, the ability to do so is limited. Later, we move, leaving our parents behind with their love. But absence, they say, only makes the heart grow fonder. A terrifying thought.

I left my mother and now, many decades later, she has left me. Still, my mother loved me, and that fact remains.