Living abroad for the good part of 12 years makes me really appreciate the odd phone conversations that happen.  I travel to Canada maybe once every 2 years and haven’t been back to celebrate Christmas for nearly 6, which is mostly for financial reasons.  My mother is a woman who has a life of her own, and so might call once every 3 months.  I, on the other hand, try calling once a month to say hello!  Sometimes I get, “Sorry, can you call later? We’re busy” which is cool.  It’s not that we don’t want to talk, it’s just we have our own lives to live in our respective time zones.

So today, of all days, when I’m feeling a little down about not making a lot of progress on my thesis, my mother calls to say hi. The conversation was about 10 minutes long which consisted of me venting recounting my plan to go into submission pending/how stupid UK Visa paperwork is/stress about thesis writing.  At the end all she said was, “Y’know, it’ll be ok and it’ll all work out.”  Usually my mother would be asking about the whowhatwherewhenwhyhowmuch but this time, she didn’t.  And that was a big deal. Sometime you just need you mom to tell you that you’ll be fine.