I was offended. I was left out. And after her friends would leave she would stare into the distance, as if she were contemplating a road and a journey which I could not share. I thought I knew my mother, but I was wrong. There is a stranger in even the ones we love the most.
Intimacy is a limited thing.
Some of the loneliest times in life are when we find ourselves going through some inner change that no one else can understand. Children leave home and a mother has to figure out who she is now. Retirement brings depression, listlessness, aimlessness. Teenagers and their parents can hardly believe they share the same blood. One day God's touches us with a hand both gentle and overwhelmingly powerful, and suddenly our hearts are filled with yearnings that can seem so strange to those who thought they knew us.