"I am a collection of dismantled almosts"
on marriage of mother to child, the let-go and other thoughts; one year later
About a year ago I recorded a podcast with the tattoo artist, Scott Campbell who I met because once upon a time we very briefly “dated.” We are now friends and I adore him and was honored to be a guest on his new podcast where he interviews people while giving them tattoos.
On the pod (titled Stupid Things for Love) we talked about dating as a single parents, death (Scott lost his mother when he was very young), survivor’s guilt and the overwhelm I felt letting go of my son who — at the time of recording — was months away from going away to college in Boston. (The tattoo Scott gave me during our interview, pictured below was a compass with all four of my children’s initials, marking the transition, not only of Archer but of all four of my kids’ simultaneous graduations.) The episode went live a month ago and you can listen to it here.
Scott interviewed me around the same time I wrote the below post — a post I originally published behind a paywall. But listening to our conversation a year later reminded me of what I wrote this time last year and how I felt letting go of Archer — a feeling that — for me was specific to our relationship — not only because he is my oldest child and only son but because his birth meant the death of a youth I never gave myself permission to grieve.
I wrote about this in last week’s post as well — the revisitation of past selves via the reunions hosted in the audiences of bands who were always more than just bands. The echos of past lives that are as distant as they are familiar. Our decisions as lyrics in “old” songs.
Remembering what it felt like to be young while paradoxically recognizing what it means to be removed from one’s own youth is humbling and necessary — but it also feels a little bit like attending one’s own funeral in a way. Not that I feel dead, but there is grief in the margins of every turned page and every ceremony is a doorway without handrails.
I attended an end of the year celebration for my daughter’s theatre class yesterday and watched as this year’s seniors said goodbye to their peers and teachers, and my grief immediately returned, this time not only for my son (a soon to be college sophomore!) but for my daughter who now attends the same school my son graduated from. I kept looking back at her like wait you’re gonna go, too? Oh, right. Of course you are. It’s okay! It’s okay. Fuckkkkkkkk. I mean, hooray! I mean, fuckkkkkkk.
In the podcast I talked about marrying my son because that is what I did. And so, my marriage, in a way I wasn’t anticipating, felt over — again — when my son left for college. It had occurred to me that my allegiance for eighteen years had been to him and the family I was committed to building because of his birth.
My allegiance had also been to my daughters, of course, but I had never known them without him. And I had never known me — the adult woman — without him either.
My son had been the nucleus of our family — and therefor my life — for so long that the anticipation I felt knowing I would soon live without him made me feel anxious and insane. Which paradoxically also made me realize how crucial it was for me to let him go.
Over the last year, I have been doing deep work excavating the room I once inhabited in order to restore and validate the parts of myself I abandoned in order to become a mother and wife.
The parts of myself I chose NOT to keep. I have allowed myself to grieve both on and off the page the loss of not one but TWO children to adulthood. My son. And also me.
In A Self-Portrait in Letters, Anne Sexton writes, “I am a collection of dismantled almosts” and every now and then I will pass a window that reflects a what-if or trip on a fragment and fall to my knees.
I will think, “what if I never met Hal?” and panic. “What if I never married, never had my son or knew my daughters? What if I chose not to keep my pregnancy and ended up in a completely different life? And because Hal hasn’t been here for almost six years, the what-ifs feel even more plausible. Like I just woke up in a house full of kids and don’t remember how they got here or what we’ve been through as a family or what we used to look like then or even what we look like now. (What DO we look like now?)
As I write this, my son, who is now home for the summer is off traveling with friends he met from college — experiencing his first adult trip with chosen family and I am elated for him to have friends he adores and to be experiencing his VERY OWN LIFE. And yet, his absence is a reminder, not only of his absence from us but of the whiplash born from this season of parenting from afar and then back again.
Anyway. I wanted to share this post again — a post I previously published last June — this time for free subscribers — who may be in the throes of similar feelings. (I have spent the last few days with those who are in throes of similar feelings.)
I turned 42 the week my grandmother died.
Her death came hours after Fable’s graduation which came hours after Bo and Revie’s graduation which came days after Archer’s graduation which came days after his 18th birthday. A month in the life of alloftheabove.
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.
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.
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.The choice was mine to make and I made it and I think a part of me felt that leaving — even when I wanted to desperately — meant I was leaving that choice. Because my marriage was never about being a wife to my husband.
I didn’t marry him.
I married the baby, half-grown inside of my body.
I married my son.
Which is why, in the months leading up to his graduation, I was paralyzed with a grief that felt like death. Because it was. It is. Not that I didn’t expect it to feel like this, I did. I just didn’t know what this would feel like. Couldn’t possibly (how could I possibly?) until now.
Perhaps that’s why I wrote the letters. I have always thought of the end while in the throes of beginning.
I don’t know how not to bend time so that its edges touch. I have lived my entire life in circles. Spinning from them. Unable to stop
A boy who becomes a man is a time capsule. And the girl who became a woman through raising one is a time capsule too.
“Do not open until you’re 18.”
But one cannot move forward with her feet in her mouth.
***
A few months ago, I met someone on an app who reminded me of all the boys I used to date in my late teens and early 20s. He had bad tattoos and calloused hands and we fucked on his bed — a mattress on the floor — in an apartment with no furniture — surrounded by books he found on the side on the road and one broken piano he planned to eventually fix.
I hadn’t been in an apartment like that for 19 years but there was a time when everywhere I went was that apartment. Every man I slept with was that man. Even the man I married, started in that room. On that mattress. With those same books and cigarettes in bed.
It is perhaps a strange thing to admit to an audience — that in order for me to come full circle with how I became a mother I had to remember who I used to go home with, but separating sex with unplanned parenthood is like skipping to the middle of the story out of puritanical convenience.
The truth is, I became a mother, not because I was ready to build a family but because for years I got off on the grit of a certain kind of man and his mattress. Because all of my life, I went along with whatever. Never said yes or no. Just accepted what was and kept going.
We smoked in bed afterward — something I have not done since those early days with Hal — then read from a book he found on the street — one that made him laugh he said and wanted to share. I read, squinting, without glasses, passing it back to him between paragraph breaks. And when the chapter was over, he closed the book, offered me something to eat before disappearing, naked through the doorway.
“Never mind. There’s no food. How about some water from the tap...”
“Sure.”
I left soon after and didn’t see him again after that — won’t, and that’s the difference. But on the way home I called a friend, described the night like it was time travel — how I felt something in that bed that reminded me of a version of me I used to love, despite appearances. Water from the tap.
After that, I felt her with me. The version of me who was wild and free and sought same. Who was reckless because she didn’t have to worry about anything or anyone but herself. Who opened her door to strangers. Who went home with the kind of men who would never give her what she was supposed to want. The kind who lived out of cars and on friend’s couches. The kind of men who would never break her heart because they knew she would eventually grow out of them. Reckless men can be the safest kind.
Before I became a mother, I used to tuck grown men in on the floor. Roll over in my bed and find them beside me. Take off their shoes. Feed from the air of their empty refrigerators. Drink their warm tap water and say, mmmmm.
The “this will never go anywhere” relationships have always been my speciality. But this one conjured a specific kind of ghost. And suddenly there she was with all her early 20s hope. Her silver-ringed fingers in my pocket, picking at lint and crumpled receipts. Dirt under her nails from all those years of scratching.
She swung beside me at all the graduations, pinching the ends of the blazers I wore to impress her. Look at me, I raised a man. Look at me I’m so sophisticated now. A true adult.
I wanted to impress her. To show her that I did good. I wanted her to understand why I didn’t turn left that summer. And why I made the right choice.
Would you just look at him? And her? And her and her?
And isn’t it crazy that he graduated from high school the same age I was when he was born? What are the chances. The DNA of coincidence. A sign, I was meant to birth these exact children and those exact ages.
23 and me.
ED: I once asked Math twitter to explain how this was possible. That all of my children would graduate the same years I was old when they were born. (Archer, ‘23, Fable, ‘27. Bo and Revie, ‘30. ) Nobody could explain it. Which, was the answer I was looking for.
Sometimes you can’t explain why.
Sometimes you cant even explain why you can’t explain why.
***
My Grandma Betty’s health took a turn soon after Archer’s graduation and throughout both of my girl’s culmination ceremonies, I sent my parents photos of my girls accepting their you-did-its! while my parents sent me videos of my grandmother accepting hers and it felt sort of magical, the way we passed transitions back and forth. A collective ephemera of lasts. Four generations crossing thresholds, moving through. Children letting go of parents letting go of children letting go, go, go…
Time capsules, all of us.
My grandmother knew what she wanted in both her life and her death and she asked for it. And in her final hours, a room of friends and family surrounded her, singing. My father, her son — ever so tenderly touching her hair. Her funeral reflected her dying wishes and also her living light. Everyone carrying her on their hands and in their voices and stories and songs. I am certain that I am not the only person she changed with her open-armed death — something she had been preparing for with love as opposed to fear for as long as I can remember.
How are so many of us so afraid of the one thing we know we will do? (Is it because it is modeled to us to be so afraid?)
Not just of death but of change. Of risk. And a willingness to tear down and rebuild paradigms. To cancel plans and follow hearts and say FUCK IT, this isn’t what I want anymore, this is. Something bigger. Bolder. Worthy. Mine.
This is what I landed on, not during my grandmother’s funeral but at my friends’ wedding two days later.
Two women — both in their 40s like me and previously married — both brave and beautiful lighthouse humans —overlapping their lives not out of convenience or societal expectations or pregnancy but because of a love they were open to and knew they deserved. The kind of love I’ve never known but believe can exist because I’ve seen it.
I saw it.
There it was.
It was the way they looked at each other. The way their children weren’t afraid to lose their mothers to a love that wasn’t solely reserved for them. (Why do I have it in my head that I can’t have both? Is it because I never did?) And it cracked me open, the same way my grandma’s funeral cracked me open, the same way my son’s entrance into adulthood cracked me open. Closed doors suddenly swinging off of their hinges revealing a reincarnation of self.
The girl I thought I abandoned was with me all along. I just didn’t know how to look for her. That I wanted to. That I should. And she wasn’t even mad at me just a little hurt is all. Which is perfectly understandable because, same.
And it is with her now that I join forces to write another series of letters. This time to myself.
Not 18 years in the future, but right now.
And this right here, is one of them.
The following posts were also published last year about Archer leaving for college. Even better, you can read about Archer’s experience — in his own words — on his substack. <3
“Reckless men can be the safest kind.” 🔥
Wow. I am reflecting on a letter that I once wrote to my cousin's first unborn child and thanking that tired young man in me that had the courage and silliness to follow-through. I hate to awaken him, but I thought he'd find it all so amusing.
I need clarity on the open arms of your departing grandma. Thanks for a beautiful post.