202. Mae Mae & Q

Nora has a deep relationship with her dead husband’s mom, who all her children call Mae Mae. And Mae Mae has a special connection with Nora’s youngest, Q.

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INTRO MUSIC

Picture a small child, a kindergartner. He has had a long week, because every week feels so long when you have only lived through a few hundred of them. He is bored and he is overtired and he is sweaty because kids always seem to be sweaty. He has had too much of everything, and the only cure for this condition is to lay down on his Grandma’s couch while she scratches his back with her beautifully manicured fingernails.

She, too, has had a long week. Her husband has been sick for years. She lost her only son just a few years before her husband was diagnosed with aphasia, and then parkinson’s, and then dementia. She has lost him, slowly, and repeatedly, for years. He is sleeping on the chair where he likes to sit, and she is on her knees, beside a little boy, whispering soothing words into his ears.

This is my mother in law. That is my son. 

The son I had with the man I married after her own son died.

A child who has zero shared genetic material with her, and who loves her with his whole, entire heart.

These moments – their relationship – have expanded my understanding of what it means to love. There is nobody I know who loves as unconditionally, as openly, as Mae Mae. 

It would have been easy, understandable, for us to lose each other after we lost Aaron, or in any of the years that followed. She did not have to open herself and her life to my current husband, Matthew. To the children he brought to our marriage, to this little boy, the baby of the family. She could have held us at arm’s length, she could have pushed us to a lower tier, demoted us in importance.

But she didn’t. She doesn’t.

She is the kind of grandmother that children just gravitate towards. It doesn’t matter what the situation is – it could be her husband’s burial or movie night or a pizza party – the kids all want to be right next to Mae Mae. There are only two sides to every person at a table, so she has been known to switch seats as the night goes on to make sure everyone gets an equal amount of Mae Mae.

There are many things in life that can make us believe that love is a finite resource. Many of us were raised to believe that love could be taken away from us if we were not good, that love had to be earned through hard work, and that you could lose it more easily than you could earn it. We may be afraid that more love for someone else means less for us, we may be anxiously checking our emotional inboxes to make sure the love we sent is returned, and with interest. 

How tiring.

If I were the praying kind, I would pray to be like Mae Mae. To have a heart that expands to hold people I didn’t choose, to hold my love like an open umbrella, to be a person who would take her broken heart and hand out the glistening pieces like invitations:

You are welcome.

You belong.

You are mine.

OUTRO MUSIC

CREDITS