From There to Here: Not There

By Amy L. Hatch

Brown Abbey (Photo by Bernice Hatch)

My mother’s dog is unwell.

Abbey is a chocolate Lab, a big dog, and she’s old. She has, like so many Labs, arthritis in her hips. She has fatty tumors and chronic eye infections. One of my mom’s Facebook updates mentioned that Abbey was having trouble walking, and so I called home to see just what was going on.

The news wasn’t great.

There might be bone cancer, or some other systemic problem. It could just be her arthritis acting up. But either way, the dog was very sick and my mom was upset.

So was I.

You see, Abbey is more than a dog. In some ways, Abbey is a living link to my late father, who loved that dog like a child. Abbey slept on the bed with him, he grabbed her snout in his hands and gave her big sloppy kisses. He chastised my mother for giving her table food, then fed the animal M&Ms behind my mom’s back.

Abbey took my dad’s death from colon cancer pretty hard. She moped around the house for months, and never really got her verve back. But since 2004, she has been my mother’s constant, loving companion, a quiet but steady presence in her home.

Abbey always greets us with a combination of avid affection and dread when we show up for visits and holidays; the children will carry food around the house, which delights her. They will also compete with her for my mother’s attention, which annoys her to no end.

Emmie calls her “brown Abbey” and tells people that she has a pet that lives at her grandmother’s house.

This phone call, this conversation with my mother, left me literally shaking with frustration. My not-being-there-ness hit me with full force. Some of you mistook my sentiments last week for a hatred for here, for a snide commentary on the place that you call home.

But it isn’t that. I don’t hate being here. I don’t hate here at all. I am deeply, fully invested and committed to here. I worked hard — and in many ways waged war against the lesser angels of my nature — to become an insider of sorts here.

No. I don’t hate it here. My son was born here, this is the only home my daughter remembers. The university helps put food on my table and the education my husband gets there is part of my future, too.

What I hate is not being there. Not being there when something goes wrong. Not being there to celebrate birthdays. Not being there on an ordinary June evening when my sister, her husband and their children have an impromptu dinner out with my mother and then take a spin on Lake Ontario in the family boat. Being so far away from there that getting there from here is an overwhelming and expensive undertaking.

I hate that I have to listen to my mother’s sad voice on the phone and that I cannot be there to lend her my hands and my heart and the simple comfort of my presence. I hate that I, in turn, am denied the comfort of her arms around me.

That is what I hate.

Amy L. Hatch is a co-founder of chambanamoms.com, and she still wants her mommy when she gets a bad cold. She writes “From There to Here,” a column about being a Northeastern girl on the prairie, on Tuesdays. You can reach her at amy@chambanamoms.com.

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