I miss my mother the most when I have something I would want to tell her about.

I didn't always have a very open relationship with my mother. The circumstances of my childhood had not invested in me the habit of telling my parents things about my life. At one point early on in my relationship with Jack, he asked me if I had told my parents about us and my answer of "Well, they read my blog." caught him a bit off-guard.

As an adult, I started telling her things so she wouldn't worry, or if they were things that were apt to worry her, so they wouldn't catch her by surprise if she found out about them through other channels. Later, as her conditioned worsened, I added "so she can experience this lost joy vicariously" to my list of reasons to tell her about something I was doing.

Because my concern was more with her than any deep-seated or fully-realized desire to talk to someone, everything I told her was at least lightly filtered. To prevent worry. To maximize enjoyment. To avoid the kinds of difficult and non-productive conversations that had left me tight-lipped about my life going into young adulthood.