10 honest things to tell your mom before it's too late

You just hung up with your mom. You talked about the rain, the new neighbor, the fact that she's moved the microwave again. You set the phone down and realize you still haven't told her that you laugh exactly like her, or that you finally understand why she cried in the car on certain evenings.

These aren't lines for a card. They're ten things we carry for our mom sometimes for fifteen years, without ever saying them out loud. Love isn't the issue. It's that family code where the heavy and the tender get spoken sideways, or not at all. You don't have to say everything at once. One sentence, slightly truer than usual, is enough.

Confessions

1. That I'm more like you than I've ever admitted

It took me fifteen years to realize I handle a fight exactly like you do, by pretending to tidy the kitchen. I fold my dish towels in three. The other day I said something to someone that was word for word one of your lines, and I never wanted to tell you because as a teenager, I would have died before sounding like you.

2. That I inherited your laugh

Not the polite dinner-party laugh. The other one, the one that takes off on its own when something gets past you and ends up in tears. Mine comes out the same way. Everyone tells me. I think it's beautiful.

3. That I get it now, about the car

I know now why you cried in silence on the drive home from work, on certain evenings, before cutting the engine and putting your face back on to walk into the house. I thought for a long time it was because of us, and I was seven, that's what you tell yourself when you're seven.

These days I know that exact weight, the weight of holding a house together that never asks how you're doing. I wanted you to know I've pieced it together. And that I should have come and held you, more often, longer, without asking for anything back.

4. That I'm scared of you growing old

Not scared of the idea (the idea, you manage). Scared of seeing it settle into your hands, into your voice on the phone, into the banister you hold on the stairs without saying a word, into the slowness of finding a name. I never bring it up because that would be announcing it to you.

And I'd like to tell you, before it gets too late to say it calmly, that you held me upright for thirty years without me knowing.

5. That I still wear your sweater

The navy one, the one that itches a little, the one you handed me one Sunday in October 2011 saying it didn't suit you anymore. I put it on before exams, before seeing someone I love when I'm afraid I won't measure up. I never wanted to tell you it works.

Apologies

6. For the teenage line I never took back

You know which one. So do I. It was a Tuesday (otherwise I wouldn't know it was a Tuesday), you were in the kitchen, and I slammed the door on something that didn't mean what it said. At some point we moved on, we pretended, and the sentence stayed. You can name it today, without drama. Mom, what I said to you that day, I regretted it the second I went up to my room. She's been waiting for that sentence for twenty years.

7. For the times I cut you short on the phone

When you called for the third time and I picked up too quick, too clipped, because I was "busy" (busy doing nothing, really, busy running from a serious topic that was about to come up). Mostly I was in a hurry to be thirty, to prove that my life held together without you, to stop being a girl whose mother talks about a neighbor for twenty minutes. You let me hang up every time without marking it. I'm sorry for that.

8. For the Christmases I showed up late to

Because I was coming from something else, from other people, from a life where you didn't quite fit anymore. You'd set the table as if nothing had changed, you'd leave me the seat by the radiator, and you'd wait for me to arrive before opening the wine anyway. I don't know how you say sorry for that without making it heavier than it was.

Present tense

9. That you taught me to cry without shame

Not through a speech. You'd cry in front of me without apologizing, in front of a film, in front of a piece of news, peeling onions and saying it was the onions when it wasn't just the onions. I didn't know, for a long time, what you'd handed down to me there. These days I cry at work, on the subway, in someone's arms, and I don't hide it anymore. That comes from you.

10. That you're beautiful in that photo of you from 1987

I came across it the other night. You're wearing that blue coat, you're looking at someone off-frame, and you're not quite smiling, you've got the exact smile you still have today when you think no one is watching. You don't know yet that I'm about to arrive, or that I'll inevitably become someone who picks up your photo to put it in a frame. I never told you. There. Now I have.

This list, it's the confessions one. There are also the questions you keep to yourself and the ways to thank her without saying the word. Three doorways into the same conversation.

You'll hang up with your mom, one of these days. You'll set the phone down, and two or three of these things will still be unsaid. Pick one, just one, and slip it into the next call. That alone will be a call that doesn't sound like the others.