Randi Olin

My laptop runs perilously low on power before I can recharge it. My son and I share a computer charger, and I can never find it when I need it. Over the years the two of us have also shared a phone charger, and, fittingly for a mother and child, almost everything else that involves a cord. Now that he’s 16, I’m thinking it’s time we each get our own. But there’s something about sharing these things, with him, the connection it brings, the pretend anger as we huff and puff—‘“Do you have it?

I’ve just returned from a trip home to Australia to say goodbye to my mother, who is in the final stages of terminal cancer. The twenty-two hour flight has never seemed longer. And back in the US, on vacation in Ithaca, NY, I find that the world looks different: I feel as if I’m seeing everything for the last time, as if through my mother’s dying eyes—sunlight filtering through the trees, the lake ablaze in the late afternoon.

By Randi Olin @randiolin I got used to being my son’s go-to person when he was a little boy—to tie his shoes and tuck him in at night, to pick him up when he’d fallen, to hold on tight when he was sad. “Uppa Mama,” he’d say, and I’d pull him close, the folds in his arms like faint tally marks as he’d drape himself around my neck, his head falling to a familiar resting spot on my shoulder. He wasn’t ready to come out of me when he did, I was induced a week early because of his size.