I wish ...

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Life doesn't give a lot of slack time for wishes, and I haven't wasted much of it on wishing.

My parents both died when I was in my early twenties, and just starting out. They never knew me as an adult, and didn't get to see any of my successes and failures. Maybe the latter is a really good thing.

But I did not get to know them well either. Sure, I thought I did at the time, but long reflection says that I didn't know them at all, really. When they died I had not grown enough to see things from their point of view, to see their aches and sadnesses, or to understand the ones I did see.

My mum was not a happy person, and had had a tough life. Her mother had died when my mum was 7, and that created anxiety which my mum carried  throughout her life.

And my mum could be volcanic. It seemed to me that she had only two settings, calm and explosive. You could never tell when a storm was brewing, but you knew when it broke alright. The climate at home was a bit unpredictable, and the storms could be scary.

So all my life I have thought of my mum as a little volatile and unpredictable.

Until quite recently.

It's getting late in life to have epiphanies, but now and again I just have to re-think.

My daughter is round about the age my mother was when she died, and sometimes when I see her, it is like meeting my mum again. She is facially similar, and temperamentally very similar indeed. Watching my daughter with her kids one day, a light came on in my head.

My mum did not have only two settings. She did not switch crazily from calm to explosive in a nano-second. No, she had fine gradations of increasing annoyance, moving incrementally and inevitably to a large BOOM. And I simply did not read the signals. I have Aspergers, of course, so have had to learn a lot about signals and reading other people, but at that early stage, I never saw those subtle signs, never saw the storm coming. It was always a vast and shocking surprise.

The faulty settings were not hers, but mine. Almost all my life I have done her a disservice in thinking of her as volcanic.

Now, of course, I wonder what she felt. She must have been astonished and frustrated that in spite of all her slow, measured warnings, I just kept right on being irritating, continuing to do whatever it was that was driving her nuts. It must have seemed inexplicable to her that I would be so wilful, so oblivious.

I never read her right, and often thought of her as volcanically unsafe. She never knew I had Aspergers, and must have thought of me as wildly infuriating.

Does wishing start when it is too late for hoping ?

I just wish I could say sorry, that we could have known each other better.