This One’s Gonna Hurt
There really are no words, but there is a poem
In about one month, my youngest will graduate from college. If ever there was a time to slap the ‘bittersweet’ label on an event, this would be it. I am truly and objectively in awe of all three of my children. They are all kind-hearted, creative, and brave. The oldest left me in waves, ebbing and flowing back home to safety like the Cancer sun sign she carries. The middle one left like magic; there one day and gone the next, never to return, his room a snapshot of an 18 year old ready to bloom. But this one’s really gonna hurt. You see, my youngest and I have a special bond (at least from my side) because it was just the two of us during an intense and pivotal time in my life, when my intuition tried to guide me to a place of safety and calm. Ultimately, I ended up denying my intuition (as most women are trained to do from toddlerhood), and for years after the disaster which resulted, I told myself I was a bad mother for failing to protect my children from the chaos and pain we would live through for another few years.
Desperate people do desperate things in complicated situations, I tell myself of that time period, and all involved. But my children were at the adults’ mercy, so I take responsibility for the scars they carry into adulthood. I am now at the point I eventually got to with alcohol use disorder. While it was not my fault, it is my responsibility. And it is from that acceptance that I am able to move forward. My children and I are simply ordinary people with exquisite gifts scattered among the scars, doing our best in this complicated and beautiful world.
My youngest plans to serve as a police officer after he graduates. I know his experience on the front lines between human decency and the laws of our democracy will put him in desperate places and complicated situations. I accept that his experience will be as bittersweet as mine has been, navigating the natural and unnatural laws of motherhood.
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Below is a poem I wrote for him on his 22nd birthday in October 2023.
Drum Circle Lullaby
“Look up”, I said, pointing to the sky, my hand on my belly, you in utero, the month before your birth
I showed you a sky so blue, so unreal it had to be fiction, an expanse uninterrupted save for the Sun
The vibration of airplane engines, imprinted in your bones as they morphed from soft to hard
That soothing rumble had been your lullaby for seven months
For the month before your birth, your mechanical lullaby was lost.
But it reverberated in your bones, a sort of DNA of sound
As you grew, the background noise remained your unconscious drumbeat
First in the Seattle skies, then on Bay Area train tracks, then under the flight path at school
Until the vibration you had felt first as the cells that would have your name became a vibration of your making through your drumsticks
Then for the second time in your life, your 18th year, the skies, the rails, the roads fell silent.
A second anomaly
The silent warning bell twice rung in your existence
Responsibility placed on your generation like a cloak
Maybe childhood never happened? For the weight of the cloak was too heavy to run beneath
So, march on you have, carrying the drums
Marching us into the future