FanStory.com - Ma (with thanks to Grace Paley)by Rachelle Foster

She would not be present when I turn thirty. She would not see me enter a new decade. We swayed on the porch swing in silence, staring at the robin she said she’d come back as.
Remembering her promised reincarnation, she started to sob. The crystal reality of not seeing her only daughter have her first kid, buy her first home, maybe marry, and maybe divorce, or blow out candles in the end of spring in four years’ time was too grey against the bright afternoon.
She did eventually depart, in her favourite season. As the daffodils reared their heads.