Why I ignore the clock when I’m talking to mom

If I want to get off the phone with my mother at 5:30, I have to start saying goodbye at 4:59.

“Okay, Mom, I’ve got to go,” I’ll say, and the clock starts ticking. “I love you,” she says. “I love you, too,” I tell her. “Kiss the kids for me,” she says, and when I had a dog, it was, “Give Rayney a hug. You know that’s my granddog.”

If I tell her to call me tomorrow, she reconfirms my home and cellphone numbers. If I say I’ll call her, she asks what time and details her schedule — including what time she’ll be back from Wal-Mart and what she plans to buy.

She blows me kisses — like, seven in a row. “You mean the world to me, sweetheart,” my mom tells me, and she might start to choke up. And if I give that any energy, if I say, “Aww, Mom, don’t cry,” sometimes that’s all it takes to send her right back to the beginning and we go through the whole sequence again.

I used to get to the end of these conversations feeling like I might start keening or breaking into Negro spirituals. “Lord, just take me now.”

“Momma, you are killing me,” I’d think. Because I’d be rushing, always rushing, and I was so impatient with the long ritual of my mother’s farewell.

But I was younger then, and I didn’t understand the value of time.

I’m always trying to fit 12 demands into a day that has room for only seven, and there’s nothing for it. The time always has to come from somewhere.

It’s just in the past year or so that I’ve decided it will not come from my mother.

Nearly every day, I read an online tribute someone has shared about their mom. “She played a mean game of Scrabble, made cussing sound like poetry and, I do believe, could speak with animals,” read one from a colleague.

“She prepared three scrumptious meals every day for 50 years, washed and hung clothes on the line, ironed perfect creases,” read another from a friend on Facebook.

My own mother is always giving me impossible-to-execute orders: “You go right in there and tell The Washington Post that you need your rest and don’t call you after 7.”

She makes my well-being central to her own, then sets herself up as centurion to ward off threats against it. Of all the people who hold me dear, she is the fiercest, and the rhythm of her love can lull me into a reverie.

Even if a mom’s love can sometimes feel like a little too much.

Writer Jene Desmond-Harris says her mother encouraged her to take yoga to relax — then worried that she was overstretching. “I realised that no matter what happens in my life, fretting is just going to be something she does and a way that she shows love. But sometimes I remind her that I’m happy, healthy, employed and not a drug addict, just to keep things in perspective,” Desmond-Harris says.

“As your mother gets older, and that’s true of all of us, we need our children more than they need us,” says Rita Bonchek, a retired psychologist based in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who specialised in grief and loss. “We need you because we don’t have work, we don’t have all the obligations. We need all of you and you have your own lives. Somebody has to stop and say, ‘What is it I want with this relationship?’”

As the child, “you want to do as much as you are able to, so you don’t have a long line of woulda, coulda points” after your mother is gone.

I’ve decided I won’t only rhapsodise about what my mother meant to me when she is no longer here. I will also make daily decisions about five- and 10- and 15-minute increments of time while she is. Because there will never be anyone like her in my life again. Because I know so many people who would give all the world to have five more minutes with their mom.

Last year, I started this game with her. “I love you more,” I’d tell her, and at first, she couldn’t even process this. “Come on now, don’t say that,” she’d say, all confused. Now, she has the hang of it. Sort of. “Before you say you love me more, don’t say it, because that’s not true,” she laughs.

Lately, because she knows I’m overextended, my mother has started to tell me, “I don’t want to hold you up, sweetie,” at the end of our conversations, and I find myself rushing to reassure her. “No worries, Momma. You’re not holding me.”

My mother loves me more, and if she wants to tell me, then I want to hear all about it.

— Washington Post