The Cut - My Mother’s Envy Will Outlive Us Both

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things started going haywire with my mother. But I have a guess. Several years ago, during a few days in Malibu with my husband, Rob, I woke on my birthday to a dozen missed calls and texts from my daughter. The kind every parent dreads.

“There’s an intruder.”
“We’ve called the police.”
“Mom. I’m so scared.”
“PLEASE ANSWER YOUR PHONE!”

The messages had been sent from 30 miles away, back home in Los Angeles, where my mother, then in her 70s, was visiting and staying with my 16-year-old daughter. As she was going to bed, my mother said she saw someone standing on the balcony. She frantically awoke my daughter who then called 911. They cried and huddled in my daughter’s room until police with shotguns arrived, broke down the kitchen door, and swept through the house. There was no sign of an intruder. No footprints. No unlocked windows or doors. Footage from outside cameras showed nothing until the police came.

One of the cops said, “Maybe you saw a ghost.”

The second eclipse season of 2024 begins with tonight’s lunar eclipse in Pisces. Eclipses tend to mark dramatic moments of change and transition; this one in particular invites you to release something that’s been weighing you down — a relationship gone sour, some long-held criticism of yourself, an old goal that no longer makes sense for the person you’ve become. Read your full horoscope here.

Sign up to get Brooding, a subscriber-only newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.