between Tangier and the Blue City

choice is a love story

I have had a recurring nightmare since my son went away to college that he calls me to let me know he’s going to become a father.

It is hard to explain how the greatest thing that has ever happened to me is also my biggest fear for my kids. I want them to have full lives before they decide to change directions. I want them to choose themselves over everyone else during their twenties. I want them to figure out who they are before committing themselves to a relationship. I want them to live untethered to the kind of responsibility parenting brings. I do not want them to have to choose one version of themselves over another. I want them to see the world. There’s such a lot of world to see.

Because while I would make the same decision I made to have my son when I did IN EVERY LIFETIME, I will always be curious about the life I didn’t choose. And denying the part of myself that wonders if… means denying every part of myself that exists because of.

Something you should know about my son is that he knows. He knows that I chose him instead of the other life. It is a conversation we have had with and without speaking about it for twenty years. Perhaps this is a conversation all mothers have with the children they unexpectedly got pregnant with, I don’t know. But even before, I never lied to him about where he began.

Wrote a whole book about it even.

I have always held the belief that on the other side of this life there is another one. And every choice I make is mirrored by its opposite and that is why I do not judge my choices or anyone else’s.

What is right for me is so often someone else’s wrong and vice versa. What feels true to some feels like a lie to others.

This is why I find it so abhorrent that ANYONE would attempt to make a choice for another person. Forcing someone to choose an adventure that is not their choice to make is the worst thing a person can do to another person. It is bad parenting, bad government. Abuse.

***

I often wonder how different my relationship would be with my son had I been forced to give birth to him. How he would see himself knowing he was unwanted. How I would have rebelled against him — his manhood a reminder of the people in power forcing the compliance of other bodies.

It is complicated to mother sons when you have been traumatized by men. It is also healing to raise someone who is the best man you have ever known in your whole life.

And he is.

But I would not have been able to raise him the way I did had he been forced on me. I chose him the day I decided to become a mother. And I have chosen him every day since.

The only difference is that, over time, I have learned to choose me, too.

***

Just after I dropped Archer off at college I wrote about what it was like to read the letters I wrote to him when I was pregnant. Twenty-three years old and still very much a kid myself, I chose to be a mother during a time in my life when I had planned for a much different trajectory.

I wrote about the letters, here.

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.

The way my entire life curled around him like an embrace. How the decision to marry, to have another child, to stay home and write about my life instead of move overseas and write about other things — meant closing other doors that have all these years remained closed and buried under the floorboards of my foundation.

An amputated arm with a hand on the end of it and chip-nailed finger nails, scratching. A decaying corpse of what ifs…

***

There is a part of me who died when I chose to be a mother. A part of me that died again as a wife. These are not sad deaths necessarily but they are still deaths and I did not acknowledge them as so until recently. I did not allow myself to properly grieve the love story I didn’t have or the adventures I didn’t take in my youth.

There are hundred deaths that happen with every decision made and because I understand that now I can make space for myself in a way I never could before. I can allow myself to feel the complexity of complete joy for my son and also a deep grief for what didn’t happen because I chose to become a mother when I did.

This feeling is not of regret but an acknowledgement of choice and all of the feelings that have lived in my body as a result.

To deny the girl inside of me who mourns for the trips she never took and the kind of love she never had in her marriage would be to deny myself real feelings that I now allow myself to have.

If anything it has made my elation for my son all the more poignant — my love for him all the more poetic. The complexity of his beginning allowing for this kind of unconditional love — not only for him as my son but for me as a woman. His mother but also myself. Like, look what we did. We chose each other. We gave each other this life.

new. fall, 2005

also new, fall 2023

I had planned to join the peace corps in Morocco before I met Hal and got pregnant. I had always wanted to see Morocco. Felt a pull to it somehow. There are certain places and things that consume us and I have a theory about why we fall in love with people even when they’re wrong for us or know within moments of meeting that we’ll be friends until we die. I don’t believe in reincarnation but I do believe in epigenetics. That we respond to what is familiar even if we don’t know why it is. Like seeing a ghost under someone’s skin. And when we feel pulled to a person or place, we are being triggered with the remembrance of our ancestry. That there are places that make us feel afraid, safe, anxious, loved because on a cellular level, we remember.

Anyway. That was what Morocco felt like to me.

Archer knew the pregnancy or Peace Corps story because I told him about it. Knew that had he never been born I would have been there in the summer of 2005. So when he told me he had booked tickets with his friends to go to Tangier, twenty years later, I was elated but also… something else. I told him how excited I was for him and proud that he was making all of these travel arrangements on his own and then when I hung up the phone, I burst into tears.

I didn’t even understand what was happening at first. Maybe I’m just tired, I thought. But then I realized I was grieving — deeply — for the twenty-three-year-old me who poured over the Internet when it was still dial up doing research on where in the world she wanted to go.

How I had just read Shutterbug by Deborah Copagan and decided I wanted to join the peace corps then possibly become a war photojournalist just like she was because I, too, wanted to feel alive and tell stories and be brave. It took me years to realize that I could still feel alive and tell stories and be brave as a mother who wrote about the wars going on in her interior life.

It was almost as if I woke up and was like WHY DOES HE GET TO GO IT’S NOT FAIR and then had a temper tantrum in my soul. An embarrassment, honestly, and one I am only admitting here because I think I needed to let her get that shit out so she could move on.

…I never grieved her — the other arm. The one I tied, lifeless, behind my back. I have, my whole life, been fiercely loyal to my decisions, even if I had to break all the rules to maintain them.

And so, within the paragraph breaks of this month of a thousand transitions, I found myself, in a way I never had before, feeling for the other arm. Questioning the decision, not to be a mother, but to love in one direction all these years. To say, okay, baby. I’m yours. I will grow you up. I will wholly commit to this relationship even if it means abandoning others. Even if it means — and at times it did — abandoning myself.

***

Archer has been studying abroad since early January. His second sophomore semester spent in the Netherlands where he continues to study politics — a wild time to do so — an even wilder time to do so abroad. He had planned to take weekend trips and since his arrival, has done so, with plans to see a total of ten countries before he comes home for summer break.

I had assumed that would mean European countries which is why Morocco caught me by surprise. And while he didn’t send me photos until after his other trips — first to Amsterdam then to Prague, he immediately Whatsapped me from the Tarmac in Tangier. And continued to send me photos throughout his trip.

It wasn’t until he sent a video he took from a camel, though, that I heard my twenty-three-year-old voice in my ear. No tantrum this time. She wasn’t even jealous. No, this was something else. She was as lit up as he was, his face appearing on screen with a wider-than-a-mile grin from a part of the world we chose not to see in order to be his mother.

Suddenly it was me and her watching him together. The pre-baby me and the mother-of-an-adult-son-now me reflected back in this image of the boy I chose knowing she would have to cancel the life she thought she’d have, like LOOK WHAT HAPPENED INSTEAD. LOOK WHAT YOU RAISED. YOU MADE THE RIGHT CHOICE. EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE THE SAME RIGHT TO THIS CHOICE.

And it healed something in me. Which in turn made me realize how important it was for me to acknowledge that there was a wound there to begin with. How so much of healing is allowing yourself to feel sad about things that also bring you so much gratitude.

The first book I wrote was about this. Sort of. But I was too close to it then to have any perspective on the shift. On the choice. On what it would mean, eighteen years later. A sharp slab of something suddenly exposed after all the rain we’ve been having.

A revelation within a shift in cabin pressure.

I have spent the last five years deconstructing my marriage but the mother in me has always been solid-beamed. Certain. Decisive and protective, with karate chop hands in the direction of anything or anyone that might threaten what I’ve built on my own from the wreckage of a passive exit. And what I did — much on my own — in the years before that.

***

After his trip we will talk on the phone for almost two hours. He will tell me that this trip changed his life. That it is impossible to explain to me what it felt like driving through this specific area of Morocco between Tangier and the Blue City. He will tell me he just got this feeling. Like for the first time he was part of the world. He will remember it forever, he says. He can’t explain it but I know exactly what he means. I was his age when I first felt it too.

Wrote about it an email to my mother from an Internet cafe.

There are so many experiences my kids will have that I won’t just like there are so many experiences I have had that my parents didn’t have. And that is one of the greatest joys of having children who choose their own adventures. Set their own boundaries. Make their own rules.

Knowing that I get to love him just as much from afar, listen to his stories, see his pictures, get to know the parts of the world I am unfamiliar with through his lens.

I will take you here one day I think you’d love it so much is what he says to me but what he doesn’t understand is that, in that moment, he already has and that I do.