Overall, Jacob, we are here to love you, and hopefully teach you how to love and feel loved as well. There is so much to learn in this world. There is so much crazy in this world. There is so much fear in this world. I just want you to know that there is also beauty and art and music and science and history and being playful and being silly and being present and dancing and jumping for joy and crying and first love and the love of your life and firsts and lasts and everything in between and living a full life. That is our job….that will always be our job…and I hope it is never done.
We were nearing the end of the week. I was anxious, short-fused. Come September, I'd be having brain surgery to remove a benign but growing tumor from my right frontal lobe, and I was preoccupied with that. More like terrified.
It was a Sunday morning and Kai was already next door at Aimee’s. Usually Sunday mornings she is with me, but everything was off-balance that week. I took a deep breath and let myself into Aimee’s side of our duplex, reminding myself of my goal – everything I told her would be true, but I wouldn’t tell her the whole truth.
My mother had been diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer that had claimed half of one of her lungs five years earlier. I loved my mother deeply but her frequent brushes with death had left me so exhausted, addled and angry that at times I felt about to spontaneously combust.
So my question is, what do you do when you know all about taking massive action to incite change but rather than it being an exciting time, it’s becoming the most overwhelming unbearable time you can remember?
Loving people means giving crumbs of my heart to them and I’m afraid that this white picket dream will devour me, leave me so that the only place I’m seen is shining through the eyes of my beloved family.
Every year there's always one. A district newcomer who, with a raised eyebrow at the report, shakes my tight walk of self-control. Who will, in the privacy of the administrative offices, voice the question - what has the Mom done to fix the problem?
I don’t remember when the knife came into play. I think it was right after I made eye contact, after she screamed at me to look at her for the third time in five minutes. It seemed to materialize out of nowhere, but I know she got it from the drawer next to the dishwasher or the countertop right above. She advanced on me, slicing through air.
I must apologize. I must do more than apologize. I must grovel on my knees for your forgiveness, kowtow to your sleeping form, throw myself upon my samurai sword in disgrace. I have failed you. I have failed as a mother, but more than that, I have failed as your provider and protector. Your existence is now irrevocably screwed up, all because I’m feeding you formula.
Months of crying and sleeping the afternoons away had brought me here. I was 31 years old, and 3 years out of law school. I was an overworked, underpaid adjunct professor of paralegal studies and criminal justice at a local college. My job didn’t offer health insurance. I could barely afford my therapist’s “low end” sliding scale. I had decided to try taking psych meds to feel better.
I stood at the cemetery, watching a box go into the earth, where the grandfather I never met lived, which now holds more family members than it did back then. I cried as I looked at my friend, her eyes red and puffy. She had lost her dad before she graduated high school, he would never walk her down the aisle, he would never see her children, he would never be at another game.
