My mother called me by the name she gave me when I was small.
Not my name. The other one. The one that only she uses, the one that belongs to a version of me that no professional document has ever recorded, that no student has ever said, that lives only in her mouth and in my chest when I hear it, a small landing, a small return to something I had not known I was away from.
I am fifty-something years old and when my mother calls me by that name I am briefly four again.
Not in the sentimental way. In the bodily way. In the way that some words bypass the adult entirely and go straight to the older architecture underneath, the part of you that was built before you knew you were being built, before you understood that the love being given to you was shaping you into a particular kind of person, a person who would spend the next five decades working out what to do with what was given in those early years.
She was having a hard day.
She called because she was confused and the confusion frightened her and she needed to hear my voice more than she needed any practical help I could offer. And she said my childhood name and I said I am here and that was the whole of what was needed, the whole of the medicine, the knowing that I was here and would pick up and would say I am here in the voice she knows, the voice that also has its roots in those early years, the voice she made.
I sat on the phone with her for forty minutes.
We did not talk about anything important. We talked the way people talk when they are not talking about what they are actually talking about, which was: I am still here. You are still here. The line between us is still open. Whatever else is changing, whatever the age is taking and the fog is softening, this is still intact. You know my voice. I know yours. We are still, after everything, each other’s.
