"I Know this is very sudden, Jia," my mother begins, but I already know what she will say. "I just booked a flight to Iceland for tomorrow." She does this very often. No, not for leisure, but for study. I know mother is searching to understand my father's final trick, to try and see what happened to him.
"When will you be back?"
I asked that question every time, never giving up hope that she knows when she will be back, but she never know. She once left me for three months when I was ten to be cared by my best friend. I guess now she can afford to be gone longer than that, just because I recently graduated high school. Within seven week I'll be gone for college, allowing my mother the freedom to be gone and live her won schedule. But that had never stopped her before. She's missed more than half of my birthdays, five Christmases, almost all my Thanksgiving, and even my graduation. But I still love her. She is still the women that raised me in the absence of my father.
"I want to be home by next Wednesday," she replies. Six days to be gone. I have equation that I use for her time estimates: take the number and multiple it by three. If she doesn't give you a day or date, that means she could be gone from two days to four months. "And then we will go and do some dorm shopping."
I already know I'll have to do all of that on my own. I even booked a flight to visit my college without her. She didn't come to scholarship nigh at the college when I got a small trophy full ride scholarship, she didn't even open the text of my prom dress when I sent her it.
I only know what it feels like to be alone, like a piece of my father that my mother tried to forgot just as she sometimes tried to forgot just as she sometimes tried to forgot him. When he left to wherever he went, he took a piece of her with him, never to return it.
And I know she feels the same.
I know she loves me, but she loved and still loves my father. She is still searching for answers eleven years later. She is so determined that she has became an absent mother. Every week when she's gone I get a check in the mail for the week grocery money and that's about it. When I told her I was off to work one day, she had no idea that I had been working at a local business for several months.
"Okay," I reply, offering her a warm smile. "I'll look forward to it."
I already know she won't be there when I move into my dorm. But I know she's taught me one thing for sure, she taught me to always be there for my family. She taught me through her poor examples. Through her prime example of motherly qualities, I know the exact type of women I want o become if I have children. Sure, no one is perfect when you make no effort after you husband dies, it is selfish to not get over the past and try to do your best for your family. But she is family, even after all she done, she is family and I