You're Not Behind, You're Early

Six months out, you can explain why you left, including the phone call you finally ended it on. You'd make the same decision tomorrow, and the daughter who couldn't do the job is still how you think of yourself. The two-hour drive every other Sunday stopped, so did the calls you used to take at work with your office door shut. She still expects you to handle the pharmacy, and she tells your sister you've abandoned her. What you learned at seven about being somebody's daughter didn't stop when the drives did.

Then you read something by a woman who's been estranged for four years and calls her closest friends her family. She sounds comfortable saying it, and you wonder how long it took her to believe it. Your mother's photograph is still in a kitchen drawer under the takeout menus, you aren't going to frame it, you aren't going to throw it out. At a barbecue, you told someone your parents live in Ohio and let him assume you visit.

You're comparing your first six months with somebody else's four years, using what she's chosen to tell you. How she spent her first Christmas isn't in there, and neither is how long she waited before telling anyone. She's describing the relationships she has now, and the change in yours is six months old.

The advice makes the comparison worse, your aunt keeps saying blood is blood, as though you've forgotten who your mother is. You believed it for nine years of two-hour drives to her house, including the winter you were working every weekend and went anyway. Somebody at work tells you to build a chosen family, and you understand the words fine, you just don't know who you'd call. There's a coworker you like and a neighbor whose dog you've watched, and you haven't asked either of them for anything.

It takes a while to find out what you can expect from people, especially when you're the one they usually ask. A friend drives you to an early appointment and waits until you're ready, she doesn't complain on the way home about her morning. You borrow $400 from her in March and pay it back in May, and she never brings it up again. The next time you need a ride, you ask her straight out, no rehearsing.

Some of it comes from ordinary time, the evenings when nobody needs a favor. Your neighbor comes over for dinner, and eventually you stop cleaning the whole house first. She knows where the glasses are, she's been over enough times to get her own. When her basement floods, you spend a Saturday hauling boxes up her stairs, and she doesn't apologize for asking.

You might eventually call these people family, or you might stop looking for a word and keep the people. Someone asks about your holiday plans and you say you're going to Dana's, you don't explain why you aren't visiting your mother. At the dentist's office, you put Dana down as your emergency contact, she's the person you'd want called. She'd answer, and you'd do the same for her.

There's no reason to call your friends your real family before you believe it, especially if saying it makes you feel you're supposed to stop missing your mother. You can enjoy your birthday with them and still check your phone to see whether she called. When someone asks about your relatives, you can say you aren't close and leave the conversation there. Keeping family for the people you're related to is allowed, and so is depending on friends who'll never be your sisters.

If you're six months out, you're still working out what to say when a coworker asks about your mother. The people who might turn into close friends are people you met recently, and there hasn't been time to find out which ones. You can ask somebody over this weekend and still have no idea what you'll be calling each other in four years.