Mood Swing

Yesterday morning I was sitting with my husband before I had to leave for...yes...yet another doctor's appointment. He had received a facebook message from his aunt and was reading it to me. When he finished, he commented on the way that people of his aunt's generation use facebook. This got me thinking about my mom. I wondered out loud if she would have learned to use facebook in order to keep up with her grandkids. I think she would have, though she would have been utterly baffled by it. I know that her grandkids were the reason she learned to use email.

Anyway, I suggested this possibility to my husband, and he proceeded to do a spot-on imitation of her with with her glasses and the way her hands would have flitted across the keyboard and how surprised she would have been by the whole thing. I laughed out loud, a completely delighted laugh. Son2 walked in the room and said, "That was a great laugh." But by the time he said that, I was crying. Tears were rolling down my cheeks because somehow, my husband's imitation had captured her so vividly. It was like seeing a disintegrating snapshot of all that was so funny and wonderful about her.

So I cried, because she is not here, and we will miss all the delight and laughter she would have brought to this crazy situation -- the birth of this unexpected boy, which will happen within days of the birth of what would have been her first great grandchild (my nephew and his beautiful wife are expecting their first baby just two weeks before ours.) All of that delight will be missing. We will talk about it, I know. We will imagine how it would all be even better with her here, but that obviously falls far short of the reality.

So I sat on the couch trying to swallow my tears and my feelings and forget about it. And then from the other room, Son3, who has been listening to this unfold, pipes up and says: "Was that a mood swing?"

And then I was laughing agin.