Love Is The Only Answer I Know

Yesterday, I learned of the death of a person who was much too young to die, a child who was part of my life for two decades as I mothered a son who was part of his life. In the process of mothering our own children, we all mothered this son.

Some deaths are inexcusable, unforgettable, untenable. When I was 21, one of my younger brothers died. When that happened, I thought, OK, that's it for me. No more trauma. Then I continued to be alive, and I discovered that life is trauma. To be alive is to be traumatized, repeatedly.

When my son was born, I wanted him to have the childhood Yeats described when he wrote, "when I was a boy with never a crack in my heart." I expect this is what we all want for our children. If you're lucky, this works for a while. Then life happens, something like yesterday happens, and we're all left trying to figure everything out all over again.

To my baby boy, I don't know how to help you with what just happened. I hardly even know how to process it myself. I wish I had answers. I wish I could lead you back to an uncracked heart. But the truth is that you and I were both just lucky to live this long without your heart cracking like this.

Is there anything any of us can do to find meaning in this? I don't know. I think everyone's answer to the question of meaning is different. What have I done? I've tried to be there for my kids. I've tried to reach out to people. All we know for sure is that we have each other in the here and now. All any of us can do is love each other while we are still in the here and now. Love is the only answer I know. 

Who Am I, Now That I'm Not Mothering?

Every day, I wake up and think, "I am going to be a better person today!" Then life happens, and I go to bed wondering, "What exactly happened here?"  Very rarely do I end the day feeling like I have met my goal of personal betterment. Recently, I've tried to enact a week-long deductible on all emotional reactions. If I ever feel compelled to confront anyone for any reason, I invoke my week deductible. Partly, this is a personal cooling-off period, because I do tend to run hot and cold. But more importantly, it is because I've found that truth is usually revealed very slowly. 

Let's take my own life experience as an example. When my son was born, my goals for him were that he 1. not die; 2. not end up in jail; 3. not impregnate someone before he was ready to be a father; 4. not end up a drug addict; and 5. not end up sleeping on my couch.  I realize these feel like "givens" to a lot of folks, but at that point in my life I felt like Chicken Little. I fully expected him to die before he reached the age of five. 

I wasn't prepared for what would happen if he met all those goals, because I wasn't able to think that far ahead. He was my first child. When he was born, my mother had been dead for only about five months, and my younger brother had been killed a little over four years earlier. Somehow, I thought I was supposed to be able to find a way just to be okay with all of this. After all, I'd always been the strong one. What a crock of shit. When your life explodes, you can't walk away and pretend like the fire didn't touch you. I've been treading water his whole life and had no idea I was stuck in a rip tide. 

When the distractions leave, the scars will show. Only now, his life-time later, do I see how damaging it was for me, in my early twenties, to have been led to believe I was supposed to be able to handle all that trauma on my own. I never stopped to think about who I would be when I wasn't mothering. It's funny that my goal for my kids was for them to move out and move on, never giving a thought to how that would involve their moving out and moving on from me. I didn't realize how rarely they would be in my life once this goal was met.

Every day now, I try to recreate myself into someone my children can be proud of, into a person they won't dread calling. It's not an easy task when your only real vocation has been to be their mom. When I start to berate myself because I feel so damn useless sometimes, I remind myself that there are two good people in a world that happens to need good people who are there because I've been able to stumble through the last twenty-five years more or less undiminished, and I forgive myself.