mother's day 2009

I have been re-reading The City Not Long After because of the flu connection, and also because of the motherless connection.

I was thinking that it seemed kind of weird when Jax is looking for her mother in the city and it seems like her memories of her mother are almost as far away as my own. Her mother had just died (weeks?) before, but the scenes seem much more like it was years before.

Then when I got to the part where she finds her mother's house, I realized that she's really looking for who her mom was before the Plague, when her mom lived in San Francisco with her dad and her brothers. Before she fled the city and gave birth to Jax.

That explains a little more why the story and her emotional connection to her mom seems to resonate so much with me. The mom she knew most recently doesn't feel like her real mom, the woman before the Plague.

(and of course it's interesting with swine flu happening now. I hope Pat doesn't think I actually think that the events from her book are going to happen now. She looked kind of worried when I mentioned I was re-reading it, kind of in conjunction with Mother's Day and kind of in conjunction with the swine flu recent events).

I wrote a blog post for Can I Sit With You and actually sent it in last night, about trying to write about what it was like between 12 and 16.