Now that I'm grown and out of the house, married for ten years with children myself, I've found that my relationship with my mother has evolved.  We have always been very close, but since I've spread my wings and left the nest, our relationship has actually deepened and reached a whole new level.  I still look to her for advice and assurance, but it's mostly on things relating to motherhood -- how to be a good mother, like she was when I was small.  We've developed a strong comaraderie, a deep friendship founded on trust and understanding.  I need her more as a confidante than a "mother," per se, at least in the typical sense of the word (which, for me, draws up images of someone to kiss your wounds or dry your tears, wipe your nose and bring you warm soup and fizzy drinks when you're ill and stay home from school).

Last spring, though, I was reminded that I still do need to be "mothered" on occasion.  It took me a year to get around to writing this, but the words finally came.

The last weekend in March of 2010, I took my boys to my parents' house for the annual Easter Egg Hunt.  Friday afternoon when we left home, I was tired but fine.  By the time we got to Nana and Papa's house two hours later, I felt horrible.  I went to lie down for a few minutes and didn't come downstairs for 6 days.  I had what I thought was a horrible stomach bug, but it didn't go away.  On Sunday afternoon, I was too sick to get in the car and drive my kids home, so my parents met my husband halfway for a tradeoff so the boys could be home and go to school.  I was planning on driving home the next day.  The next  day came and I still couldn't keep food down and was almost too weak to move.  The day after that, my husband called wanting to know when I was coming home, that they needed me.  I sensed a little desperation in his voice.  I willed myself to pack up my things and get ready to head home.  My body said "NO."

My mom got home from work, and I said "I think I need to go somewhere about this."  So, my mom changed out of her work clothes, checked in on my dad, and said, "Let's go."

We went to an Urgent Care center, which sent me directly to the emergency room, where I was admitted to the hospital and didn't see the light of day for the next sixteen days while doctor after doctor performed test after test trying to figure out just Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot was wrong with me.  All the while, my parents were by my side.  Every single day my dad would come in, right about the time I was ready to take a late-morning snooze, and sit with me for about three hours while I slept.  He flirted with the nurses just enough (he's a Southern charmer if ever there was one) to get me extra pillows, fizzy drinks, and extra grippy socks so I could walk the halls without fear of foot fungus (I got it anyway).  After the first week or so, when my stomach started to get back on course -- because the infection had moved itself to my lungs -- he brought me lunch most days so that I didn't have to choke down the hospital food.

My mother came every evening after she was finished at work, and she did motherly things that I was too embarrassed to have nurses help me with.  After my surgery, when I was tethered to my bed due to a chest tube and couldn't reach the sink, she devised an ingenious method for brushing my teeth involving three styrofoam cups in rotation.  She helped me bathe (both mortifying and saintly at the same time) and tucked me in.  On Easter Sunday, when I was still there, she brought me a big, snuggly stuffed rabbit, because "everyone needs someone to cuddle with at night."

It was a lonely, scary time, made all the worse by the fact that my husband and children were home in a different state and I missed them terribly and was very concerned that they weren't going to make it without me.  But they did, and we probably all appreciate each other a little more as a result.  We had many, many friends helping us out during this time, but the care my parents gave me, their "mothering," 16 years after I had left the nest, was exactly what I couldn't have lived without.