Chicken Soup for the Soul: Reboot Your Life: 101 Stories about Finding a New Path to Happiness by Amy Newmark & Claire Cook

Author:Amy Newmark & Claire Cook [Newmark, Amy & Cook, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing
Published: 2016-07-28T18:30:00+00:00

Meeting Mom

Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself remains a very effective therapist.

~Karen Horney

“So, what does poison ivy look like?” my mom asked with a nervous laugh. I could hear her picking her way gingerly through the bramble—over rocks, around prickly bushes. As she followed me over a fallen tree, I realized that some part of me was purposefully choosing the toughest, most overgrown path and, amazingly, she was following nearly without complaint.

As we trudged through the damp weeds and clambered over a jutting rock, I felt the years melt away... I was no longer an out-of-shape teacher in her late twenties leading her overweight fifty-year-old mother down into an abandoned ravine choked with debris and runaway weeds. I was twelve again and, for the first time ever I was sharing a childhood exploration with my mom.

A lump rose in my throat and I blinked hard, silently chastising myself: Don’t cry now, she’ll never understand. The tears came anyway and so I tucked my head down and pressed further into the overgrowth.

“What did you and Cyd do down here?” my mother puffed as she struggled to keep up.

“You’ll see, if we ever manage to find the creek under all these weeds.”

As a kid I had been as familiar with this ravine as I was with the path that ran from my house to Cyd’s, but it hadn’t been so overgrown then. It used to be so open and pretty, and when I had stood at the mouth of the ravine with my best friend and looked down, it was like staring into our own private Land of the Lost.

We had made it to the base of the ravine by now and I caught a glimpse of the creek’s dark water beneath the branches of a fallen tree. I climbed out and balanced precariously on the limb that served as a tenuous bridge between the two banks. “See? I told you it was here.”

I stepped off onto the other bank and slipped off my shoes. The water felt just like I remembered, so cold my feet were numb to the squishy mud between my toes. On her side, my mom leaned tentatively against the fallen tree and untied her muddied shoes, which only fifteen minutes ago had been as white as her linen sheets. Then she was in the water with me, her pants delicately rolled up halfway to her knees.

At first she fretted about getting her clothes wet or cutting her foot on a rock submerged in the dark water, but soon she was staring in awe at the untouched wilderness around her. I wished I knew what she was thinking—I could see her face lighten, the worries and stresses being carried toward the river on the creek’s cool current.

She spotted a crayfish in a shallow pool near me. As she leaned toward the water for a better view, I couldn’t restrain myself. I knew it would break the spell and ruin the moment, possibly the whole afternoon, but I just couldn’t keep my hands from doing it.

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