We often don't recognize the value of everyday communications until they're gone. These voicemails - mundane, repetitive, sometimes frustrating - have become precious artifacts of a complicated love.

How do you tell someone you love that their deepest conviction—the organizing principle of their entire life—is something you no longer believe? At some point, I realized that I needed to disappear into the crowds of the world and begin my life. Start again. Maybe for the first time.

I've spent much of my adult life running from the limitations of small-town life. I fled to big cities, sought education, built a career. Mom's voicemails remind me that there's wisdom in the slow life. The constancy of her check-ins—her way of maintaining connection across our separate geographies—became the thread that kept us tethered through the years. Not the shared faith we once had, not the physical proximity of family, but these moments of reaching across distance to say, simply: I'm still here. I still care where you are. I still want to know how you're doing.

In our family, physical affection wasn't common. I don't remember hugging my parents as a child. The standard greeting between church members was a handshake accompanied by the phrase "God's Peace." When I left the faith, the mutual greeting stopped, which created an awkward vacuum in familial interactions. In addition to new traditions like bear hugs in place of handshakes, my long-distance relationship with Mom required careful navigation. Calls every Monday and Thursday. Flowers. Handmade aprons. Gym sneakers. Saying "I love you," and hearing those rare words repeated back to me. All of it felt foreign at first, almost transgressive. But over time, it became our new ritual, replacing what had been lost with something more honest for both of us.