The Same Wound

I don't recognize the number. But I recognize the area code.

She's had fifteen phones in five years, maybe more. Prepaid, borrowed, whatever keeps her tethered to a world that has mostly stopped waiting for her. I haven't heard from her in five years but I've learned to read the unknown as a signature, a number I've never seen attached to a place I've known my whole life. Three digits that mean: it's her. It's always been her.

I pick up.

She's getting clean this time, she tells me. Really getting clean. She wants to be better. A better mother, a better grandmother, a better sister. She's going to show up. She wants to see my life. She asks for photos of my daughter.

I text them while we're still on the phone. My daughter in the yard. My daughter laughing at something just outside the frame. I pick the ones where the light is good, where she looks the way she actually is: healthy and loud and completely unaware that any of this is complicated.

My mother doesn't respond.

Two days later she calls again. I miss it. Then a text comes, long enough to scroll through twice, explaining why she needs a deposit on an apartment and how she'll pay me back and how this is the thing that will make everything different.

I tell her I can't help but I hope it works out. I mean the second part.

She tells me she'll figure it out on her own. As always. She's never had help, never had a net. She lost her parents. Her sister has written her off. She knows why, but she says it like it's something that happened to her rather than something that accumulated.

I know why too. I don't respond.

She borrowed and burned and needed and took until the people holding the net had no choice but to let go. And then she pointed at the falling as proof that no one had ever really been there.

That's the cruelest part of the wound. It teaches you to need in ways that guarantee loss. Then it hands you the loss as evidence.

She didn't just wait for the net. She burned every one that was cast.

I stopped waiting early. I decided somewhere small and quiet that I didn't need it, that I was better off building my own, that needing people was the dangerous part. I got very good at being fine. At figuring it out. At being the one who shows up instead of the one who waits.

We are both lonely in the exact same way. We just narrate it differently.

Attachment isn't a decision. It's not something you choose to feel or talk yourself into. It's built in the body, one trust fall at a time. You fall, someone catches you, and your nervous system files it away: safe. Over and over until the safety isn't something you think about anymore. It just lives in you.

She wasn't there for mine. Not the small ones, not the ones that mattered. So whatever is supposed to grow between a mother and child through all that catching, it didn't. Not in that direction. I don't have it to give back to her. That's not withholding. That's just the truth of what wasn't built.

Same wound. Different scar.

I'm trying to give my daughter something we didn't have. Not perfection. Not a mother who has it figured out, because she will see through that before she can talk. What I'm trying to give her is the thing underneath all of it: the knowing. The bone-deep, doesn't-have-to-be-earned knowing that I will answer when she calls. That she doesn't have to perform or manage me or send photos I'll never respond to just to feel like she exists in my life.

I don't know if I'll get it right. I know I'll get some of it wrong. But I know what I'm building toward and I know where it belongs.

My mother calls from numbers I don't recognize because her life doesn't hold still. Mine does. I built it that way on purpose, even when I didn't know that's what I was doing. A house, a routine, a daughter who knows where I am.

Maybe that's the net. Not the one I was supposed to be born into.

The one I'm building anyway. One caught fall at a time.