My mom kinda lost her mind last Saturday. While we were at my supervisor’s house having a grand ol’ time, I didn’t know but my mom called my cell and left me this grave-sounding voice mail to the effect of, “Cindy, Mama is so sorry. Mama did you wrong. I regret so much that I didn’t give you any brothers or sisters. In the future, when you’re married, you and [Mr. W] need to be kind to each other and persevere in your marriage and not break up or dispute over little petty things. Don’t let yourself be affected by too much.” I was like, Why’s she giving me future advice? Is she going thru one of those I’m-gonna-die-soon things again? I know they both had doctor’s appointments 2 days prior on Thursday.

So I called my parents’ house when we left and my dad picked up. I said, “Dad. Are you guys okay?”
He said, “Yeah, why?”
I said, “Cuz mom left me this weird message. Did a doctor contact you guys or something?”
“No. You wanna talk to your mom?”
“Sure.”
I heard the phone shuffle, and my dad said, “Your mom said it’s nothing.”
I said, “Okay, then see you tomorrow.” And we hung up since she wouldn’t talk to me.

Then on Sunday, when I visited, my mom told me in another room that she had gotten into a fight with my dad over the amount of soy sauce he was putting on his avocado, so my dad got mad and dropped the avocado and said he wasn’t going to eat it anymore. (She was trying to look out for his high blood pressure.) My mom was so offended she stormed off and drove around by herself, went shopping, cussed him out in her car alone, came back late at night, pulled in the driveway and realized she was STILL mad so she didn’t want to go in, and then she drove off again. She was also upset he never called her cell to check up on her even tho she’d been gone for hours. And then she tried calling me, but I didn’t pick up. So she was all crying and thinking about how she has nowhere to turn when the chips are down and her friends all have their own families so she can’t bother them and her mom’s never around and they’re not close, and how I would be in the same position without siblings. I told my mom, “I’ve learned in these past couple years that you don’t have to be blood to be family.” My mom said you can have friends but it’s still not the same; people get married, have their own lives and families and friendships loosen. You still can’t call on them at times like these.

Dwaine and I discussed the above story last nite and he agreed with me, and we decided that the last generation has different friendships from our generation. Dwaine’s and my relationship, for example, would be inappropriate in our parents’ generation. Neither my mom nor his mom have close male friends, unless it’s the husband of a close female friend and everyone hangs out as couples. But Dwaine and I go way back in a childhood that’d always had co-ed friendships and I can’t imagine life, present or future, without him.