I call my mom on Sundays, and before I’ve finished saying hello she wants to know if I ate. I’m a grown man with a stocked fridge and a job. She asks anyway, every week, in the same voice she used when I was nine.
She brought me up by herself, working two jobs in a neighborhood where you learned early which blocks to skip. We weren’t poor, but we were never comfortable either. There was enough as long as nothing went wrong, and it was her job to make sure nothing went wrong.
People like to call women like her superheroes. Most single moms I’ve met hate being called superwoman, and she’d laugh at it too. She’d tell you she was the only adult in the apartment and somebody had to do it.
It took paying my own rent to hear her properly. Keeping one person afloat wears me out most months, and she did it for two. The lines she drops in passing all came from those years.
1. “No, I’ve got it”
She says it with four grocery bags hanging off one arm and her keys in her teeth. I’ll be standing right there with both hands out, and she’ll walk past me to the door like I’m a coat rack.
For most of my childhood, help was a nice surprise at best. If the sink backed up or the car wouldn’t start, the person who was going to deal with it was her. You stop looking around for backup after enough years of that.
So now I don’t ask. I take two of the bags off her arm while she’s telling me she’s got it.
2. “It still works”
The microwave door at her place has been held shut with a rubber band since I was in high school. The toaster only does one side. Her car’s passenger door only opens from the inside, so she leans across the seat to let you in.
I’ve offered to replace all of it. She looks at me like I suggested burning money in the yard.
In our house, something was broken when it stopped doing its job completely. Anything short of that was fine, and she’d tell you so.
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3. “Did you eat?”
It’s the first question on every call and the last one before I leave her place. If I say yes, she wants to know what. If I say a sandwich, she wants to know if that’s all.
When she was working doubles, dinner was the part of my day she could still reach. She’d leave a plate covered in foil with a note on it, then call from her break to make sure I’d found it. She couldn’t be home, so she made sure I was fed.
I used to think the question was nagging. Now I hear I love you, said the only way she had time to say it for about fifteen years.
4. “I’m just resting my eyes”
She’ll be upright on the couch with the TV on, chin on her chest, out cold. Touch the remote and she snaps awake to announce she’s watching that.
Growing up, I’d find her like that with her work shoes still on. She’d get home from the first job, change shirts, and leave for the second. Sleep happened wherever she stopped moving for ten minutes.
She never once said she was tired. I think saying it out loud would’ve made it true, and she had another shift in the morning either way.
Her schedule’s easier these days. She still won’t admit to a nap.
5. “Text me when you get home”
I’m well into adulthood and I still text my mom when I get in the door, usually from the couch with my shoes on. If I forget, my phone rings within the hour.
Where we lived, a kid walking home after dark was a real worry, and she couldn’t be there to walk with me. So she built a system. I called when I got in, I locked both locks, and I didn’t answer the door even if Santa Claus himself came knocking.
I live somewhere safe now, and she knows it. But she spent years at her second job listening for a phone to ring, and that kind of listening doesn’t shut off when the zip code changes.
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6. “We’ll figure it out”
As a kid, I found this sentence deeply comforting. The car died, the rent went up, I needed money for a class trip, and she’d say we’ll figure it out in a voice so flat and sure that I’d go back to my cartoons.
I assumed “we” meant there was a team. I pictured adults somewhere, a plan, maybe a drawer with emergency money in it.
There was no drawer.
“We” was her at the kitchen table after I went to bed, moving the same few dollars between bills. Women who spend decades carrying everything for the family usually hit a wall at some point. If she hit hers, I slept through it.
She still says it, about my problems now. And I still believe her, which tells you how good she was at it.
7. “How much was that?”
I bought a new couch last year. She sat on it, bounced once, and asked what I paid.
I told her.
“For a couch,” she said.
She does this with my shoes, my haircut, my coffee. She asks politely, gets the number, and then goes silent in a way that lets me know she could’ve fed us for a month on it.
I’ve started rounding down, and I’m pretty sure she knows it.
8. “I did the best I could”
It comes out of nowhere. We’ll be talking about a cousin’s wedding or a neighbor’s dog, and she’ll go still for a second and say it, like she’s answering a question I didn’t ask.
She’s partly apologizing. She knows there were school events she missed, nights she snapped at me over nothing, years I mostly looked after myself. I know it too. I’m sure she got plenty wrong, and at twenty I could’ve given you the list.
I don’t have the list anymore. I have a rent payment, a car that needs brakes, and nobody depending on me, and some months that’s all I can manage.
So when she says it now, I tell her I know. Then I tell her I ate.
