3. the year I spent letting go

and new years eve also letting go but, like, the food poisoning version

post food-poisoned and ready to take on another year of…. who even knows!

For my last three posts of 2023, I am reflecting on the theme of this substack in three parts: 1. Mother. 2. Lover. 3. Self.

(I do realize we are nearly a week into 2024 but it was far too ambitious of me to think I would post three personal essays in two weeks during the break which has felt like the opposite of a break. My kids have been home for almost three weeks and I am hanging on by less than three threads.)

Also, I would like to thank those of you who upped your subscriptions to paid last month and/or renewed your subscriptions. You are the reason I was able to prioritize writing here in ‘23 and your ongoing support means I can continue in ‘24. Thank you. I love and appreciate you.

People say that the way you spend your New Year’s Eve is the way you’ll spend your whole year and I spent mine in several bathrooms, shitting my brains out violently sick with food poisoning.

As far as I can recall, this is a first for me and while at the time it was quite unpleasant (I just watched Poor Things and Saltburn back to back and now I feel as if I must speak like this into my key fingers and pepper in references) the postscript feels a little bit like an Alanis Morissette lyric.

Like rain on a wedding day, baby!

Anyway. Getting food poisoning on New Years Eve felt appropriate considering my last twelve months. On the nose, even. Which is why this post, which I planned to write (both wistfully and poignantly!) about the art of letting go (which is really just a chiller way of saying “embrace chaos!" a la last year’s New Year’s post) is turning into something else entirely: a post about… poop.

***

Last year, on New Years Eve, I spent the night at home, surrounded by teenage girls, writing about chaos as a welcome visitor.

Right now I’m sort of doing the same, although it’s January 4th and we just got home from ice skating and my twin twelve-year-olds are in a huge screaming-match-fight over cleanser that someone wasn’t supposed to touch and I have no energy to break it up so I’m in my bedroom pretending that I am not here.

That I am out for the night.

DO NOT DISTURB SIGN ON SOUL.

This is also what I mean by letting go.

Letting go as in knowing when to clock out and when to engage. Letting go as in embracing the shit but also protecting one’s peace. Letting go as in sitting down to write one post and then not writing that post actually at all because perhaps I do not have the emotional bandwidth to write that post this week after that year. (I totally forgot about the lawsuit, too, until just now when I was perusing the archives of what I wrote last year and was like, OH RIGHT, LAST YEAR I WAS QUITE LITERALLY ON TRIAL! Chef’s kiss!)

No, this week I will write about letting go as an act of levity! This week I will write about letting go as a tattoo which is sort of a conundrum, isn’t it? A permanent reminder that everything is ephemeral?

Letting go as in letting go of all meaning!

Everything is chaos! Nothing makes sense!

The tattoo parlor was in South Boston. I had to cross several freeways to get there which is what I did. I took this tiny little path between on-ramps as cars whizzed by me on both sides. I felt like that scene in Elf where he walks to NYC from the North Pole and ends up in… the Lincoln Tunnel. Like, wait, am I even allowed to walk here? Is this even a path? Where the fuck am I going?

But I got there. In the hour, as promised. Soaking wet from my baptism. The holy trinity of rain, sweat and tears.

I also knew what I was getting and where.

And as soon as I finished toweling myself off in the bathroom, I took a seat, picked a font and watched the words stick.

By the time the tattoo was finished, it had stopped raining; the sky, a bright blue like nothing happened.

But I didn’t need to walk back. Waited outside in the sun and called a Lyft instead.

I had meant to write about this more in full. A follow up to the college posts and a parade of farewell addresses, the above passage hinting at the feeling I had after Archer’s college drop off: a sky of bright blue like nothing happened.

In the weeks and then months after college drop-off, people kept asking me how Arch was doing, how are you doing, how is everybody doing and I didn’t really know how to answer them. I still don’t.

Mainly because it all felt so relatively easy.

Effortless.

Not at all like I thought.

“He’s doing great! We’re all doing great!”

But even that doesn’t really put words to how it’s actually felt. Especially after I spent half of last year anticipating a grief that never came. Holding on extra long during hugs. Crying at every “last.”

Maybe I got it all out of my system but I have found that preparing to let go is the hard part. Willing oneself to release the thing you know you must release is so much more challenging than standing back and watching it go. Or getting on a plane and leaving it behind…

Anticipatory grief is an earthquake during a hurricane flanked by wildfire. It is preparing for a birth and planning for a funeral in the same moment. Signing every kind of certificate with the same pen.

It is the mixing and then re-mixing of metaphors to try to set a definition for something that cannot — and will not be — defined.

On my way home from Boston, I felt at peace.

Like I had just done something big and brave just like he did. Like, together we did the thing we were supposed to do.

Archer just wrote about this, actually. I mean, not exactly but sort of. He wrote about what his first semester at college has been like and how tedious the application process was and how happy he is at his school. (He started a substack after writing a guest post here because everyone was so lovely and supportive of his writing and it empowered him to start his own newsletter, so thank you!)

He’s home now and having him here has been the best but he will leave again in a week and that will also be amazing because he loves his school and his friends and his life there — a life he has been able to shape on his own.

And it feels exciting to reach this point in our relationship. I don’t need him to need me like I thought I would and knowing that is SO FREEING. Knowing that feels like letting go of a fear I think I’ve always had: a fear that I only matter to people when they need me.

Parenting is mostly hard but there are parts of it that are so completely effortless and that is what this transition has felt like for me.

It’s felt right.

***

Before I got poop sick on NYE (sorry but I’m leaning into this now) I drove Archer out to his friend’s house, where a group of kids was meeting before the party they planned to attend later that night.

As long as I’ve had teenagers who go to parties on NYE, I do not consume substances of any kind so I can be their on-call designated driver. And, yes, I realize Ubers are a thing and my kids use them often — but still. I want them to know that I am on call and that if/when they decide to dabble in substance abuse, I will pick them up wherever they are and in whatever state they are in. That includes whatever friends they’re with as well.

One day, I will party on New Years again but it will not be until the 2030s. (I will rage so hard in the 2030s!)

Anyway, where was I, besides all over the place.

Oh, right. The car.

I am very rarely in the car alone with Archer anymore because he drives now and has his own. So. As a rarity, it was just the two of us in my car, snaking through Laurel Canyon on NYE before I got sick.

But before I dropped him off, he turned to me and said all of the things a parent would want to hear on the last night of their biggest parenting year of all time.

When I was pregnant with my son, I wrote him letters. Do not open until you turn 18, they said. I have thought about those letters a lot lately, having zero recollection of what I wrote or why I felt compelled to write them — why I didn’t want him to open them until now.

How the first writing I ever did about motherhood — about how I felt about it all — is in those letters. Private. Tucked away in an envelope in a baby book.

I couldn’t sleep the night before his birthday. I became paralyzed with fear for what the letters said or didn’t say. And when Archer asked me, the next day, if he should open them, I told him, yes if he wanted to but that I myself didn’t want to read them. That I didn’t want to know what they said.

And then I tried to explain why.

Couldn’t.

And then I tried to explain why I couldn’t explain why.

Couldn’t again. Have spent the last few months inching towards a feeling I never realized I had. A grief not just of losing my son to adulthood but of losing the child I had to evict in order to become his mother. A girl. Me.

I’m usually the one who does the car-ride pep talks but this time I just sat there and let him say all of the things I didn’t realize I needed to hear until he said them.

And those words carried me through everything that came next.

Including the food poisoning.

And DWFP (driving with food poisoning) to pick him up at 1am.

Anyway.

This post is as messy as I’ve been these last few days (I have written this whole thing in bits and spurts in the loudest house in America) but do you know that feeling when you’ve been sick and haven’t been able to eat because you have no appetite and food sounds disgusting and ew gross no never again blergh?

And then… suddenly…

… you wake up…

…with an appetite?

Like… there’s all this room now for… you don’t even know what, but… something?

That’s how I felt waking up on January 2nd and it’s how I feel right now.

Like, I learned how to let go of SO MUCH last year and now I’m, like, hungry.

I’m hungry and I’m opening the fridge to see what I have. What I can cook up.

That’s the thing about the years we spend letting go. They are also the years we make room for more. Even if we don’t know what that MORE will look like. Or taste like. Or is.

Which is fine because we don’t need to. We don’t need to know! (Everything is chaos! Nothing makes sense!)

All we need to know is that there’s room here now where there wasn’t before.

There’s room…