Our relationship remained rocky for a few years after I moved out. There were various stressors that kept our relationship strained, but thankfully, through a lot of very hard work, things were worked through and we were in a good place to get to know one another again when I became pregnant with Gracie.
I was 20 and I still had a lot to learn when it came to living my adult life. (Not to say that I still don't have a lot to learn - but looking back, I'm incredibly surprised I survived on my own.) So when I became pregnant, I really needed some additional support.
I was the first of my close friends to get pregnant, so the natural choice of people to turn to when I had questions or just wanted to commiserate with when I had morning sickness was my mother. At the time, she was living in Wichita, KS, so our relationship grew by daily phone calls. (Let's not kid ourselves here - sometimes we talked multiple times a day.)
We talked about all kinds of stuff. First we talked about my pregnancy, then we talked about her pregnancy with me and how things were compared and contrasted between the two. We talked about her childhood and my childhood and the eventual childhood of the baby in my belly. And over the course of those 38 weeks, my mother and I became friends.
A few months after Gracie was born, my husband and I got into some trouble and my mom moved here to take Gracie so we could turn things around. In the two years that she lived here, we became even closer, seeing each other nearly every day. She also formed an intensely deep bond with Gracie - a bond so deep that sometimes Gracie randomly gets upset because she misses her Mimi.
Just before Gracie's second birthday, my mom moved to Tulsa and has been there since. It was really hard to go without having my mom around, but it was also a freeing experience, as having her here also meant having a safety net I'd never had before and going without that meant I had to learn how to be a real adult (one who is a productive member of society rather than a drain on it).
We try to visit as often as we can, and we still talk on the phone almost daily. I'm not really sure why I started writing this post, or where I'm going with it from here - I guess I just realized that I haven't talked much about my mom on here and figured it's time. I love my mom very much and I am so thankful that she and I have both been able to work through our own personal issues in order to create a bond together.
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