It’s time. Once a month, I get to spend a few days with Mom, but this visit is supposed to be special. Her birthday is this week.

And I’m sick.

I don’t know if it’s allergies. I’ve never had pollen allergies before, well, except for one year back in college when the oak pollen got to me. One and only time. Last fall, I felt much like this when the mold spore count was high. Spring is trying to bud out now, so maybe it is allergies. Whatever it is, I’m miserable. Benadryl helps, but it knocks me out; Claritin doesn’t knock me out, but it doesn’t help.

So my choices are to make the 2 1/2 hour drive home (in the rain–we’re supposed to have rough weather this week) either sneezing or drugged, or to not go at all and miss her birthday, not to mention the two doctor appointments she has.

It’s times like this that I wish I had a sister. Or that Mom lived closer, or we lived closer to her.

Last week, I was engaged in a Skype meeting with the other officers of the Writers on the Storm chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers. All of them are younger than me, but we’re all in “that age,” dividing our love between elderly parents and grandkids. At the moment of our meeting, one lived with her mother, another had her mother living with her, and the third was meeting from a hospital where her father-in-law was awaiting tests. And I was dealing with allergies–or whatever–and wondering how I’d get home for our monthly visit and wishing Mom and I lived in the same town like my friends and their parents do. Wishing I lived in the same town with our kids and grandkids. Wishing we could just move back home–now–with a twitch of a nose, a blink over crossed arms, just like Samantha and Jeannie. No moving vans, no panic over whether the house will sell. Just go.

After the meeting, and during the rest of the weekend, as my eyes watered and my nose tickled incessantly–and in between times of being in a drugged sleep–I fell into a funk. Silly, I know. It’s just allergies, it’s nothing serious. People go through life dealing with worse all the time. But it’s Mom’s birthday week, and I’m miserable and homesick, and I don’t want to drive, but I don’t want to miss her birthday.

How nice it would be if a nose-wiggle really did work.