Sixteen Years I Didn’t Speak to My Mother. Then I Went Missing, and From Her Sickbed She Said “Go Find Her”

I have had a lot of years to sit with that contradiction, and I think it’s truer than it sounds.

My mother had stood on that porch and told me I wanted to chase disasters, and she had meant it as the worst thing she could think to say about a person.

And she had read me correctly.

I did want to run toward the places everyone else was running from.

What she could not see, at the time, and what it took me most of my life to see, was that it was not a rejection of the family she wanted for me — it was the same instinct, aimed somewhere she didn’t recognize.

She wanted me to build a life around caring for a few people up close.