My Mother is the Queen of Connections

My mother is the queen of connections. Tell her a name, and she'll tell you either how she knows that person or figure out where you know that person from. If she and I go shopping together at the mall, there is no doubt in my mind, ever, that she will eventually run into someone she knows, or met once and formed an instant connection with, or heard about through a friend and somehow managed to pick out of the crowd.

My mother is the queen of connections. So I wonder why we don't seem to get each other sometimes. She can start a conversation with a person she met once, months or even years ago, like it never ended. She can remind friends and family of memories from times before I was born. Yet sometimes, when she and I come together it's like oil and water. She comes from one side, I come from the other, and when we hit the middle, things just don't quite gel as they should.

So how can a woman with so many connections not share that connection with her daughter?

I'm a few days from moving back home from school for the summer. All my bags are packed and sitting in a corner of my room, a few packages left to ship off. And I'm staring at a message from my mom online. We've been talking back and forth for the past few weeks about my coming home. In emails and Facebook messages, we've expressed the same longing to see each other again. I wonder if our longings align. I wonder if she, when she expresses how much she can't wait to see me, also means, "I can't wait to see your face, because the moment I do I may tackle you with love." She doesn't say it-neither do I-but it feels like she's thinking it. So am I.

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. I disagree. I think sometimes absence makes the bonds grow stronger, the connections between people. I don't miss my mother more just because I've been away from her longer. My heart doesn't swell at the memory of her. It's quite the opposite. I've realized, during this year not only away from her but across the country from her, that the room in my heart to love her can't grow, because she's part of my heart. Our absence from each other makes me un-whole.

I don't miss her more because we're apart. I miss her because we're a part of each other.

We're not opposite sides of a magnet, or oil and water trying to combine. We're one, a single entity that's been split in two. It's that memory that makes my heart ache. And I like to think it's that memory that makes us, when we say, "I can't wait to see you," mean, "I can't wait to connect to you again."

My mother is the queen of connections. But as much as she is able to connect the dots between friends and neighbors, even complete strangers, there's no connection stronger than ours. You hear lines like, "You complete me" in the movies, and maybe meet them with subtle or exaggerated eye-rolls and the inability to suspend your disbelief so far as to trust such a line's sincerity. Yet between us, between mother and daughter, there is a connection, a connection of one half completing the other. My mother completes me.

There's a verse in the Bible, in Genesis, that explains that a man will "leave his father and mother's house" to join with his wife and become one flesh. That man and wife form a connection, a bond that makes them one. But I have never, until now, stopped to think of what that means for the young man, or young woman, before she leaves that house. What makes me whole, "one," is still connection: the connection I share with my mother. Someday I will leave her house, venture out completely on my own ... but I won't be on my own. I may leave the four walls and bricks and glass and wooden floors of her house, but I won't leave her, any more than she will leave me. We are one; together, we are whole. Together, we form the very definition of connection, of love. We may not always see eye to eye. But we live heart to heart.

And that's what makes her the queen of connections.