revisiting one milestone during another

twenty-one years on the mothership

My son, Archer turned twenty-one today so before I get back to regularly scheduled programming I wanted to repost something I wrote when I dropped him off at college nearly three years ago, with a few links to essays I wrote in the months and years I was learning how to let him go. And while I miss him terribly (tears! this is the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other and the first birthday we have spent apart) he will be home in a few weeks to see two of his sisters — my babies — culminate from middle school. (More tears!)

I grieved his childhood so completely his senior year and can already feel myself doing the same with Fable (my second oldest), who is ending her junior year and will be performing this weekend in the same play her brother performed in when he was her age. (Many more tears!)

I know many of you have been reading my work since Archer was born and when I tell you, he exceeded my wildest dreams for what a son, and a man, could be… Like it feels hyperbolic to try and write about how proud I am of him. (He is spending the summer holding down not one but two jobs in Boston AS WELL as two political internships, supporting himself financially and will be graduating a semester early after completing his last semester at The Washington Center in DC this fall. Beyond that he continues to play/perform music, act in his friends’ student films and model a kind of hopeful clarity that keeps me optimistic about the future. He is brilliant and generous, ambitious and self-motivated, clever and hilarious, vulnerable and kind. He advocates for causes he believes in with wisdom and passion and I continue to learn so much from him.

Happy Birthday to my first true love — the boy who made me a mother twenty-one years ago, now off to see the world (there’s such a lot of world to see…)

I love you, Archer Sage.

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The following post first appeared here in September of 2023.

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One of my favorite songs — a song I included in a mix tape I made earlier this week for fellow college-drop-off-parents, is called Worried Shoes. It’s by Daniel Johnston and it goes like this:

I took my lucky break and I broke it in two
Put on my worried shoes
My ah ah worried shoes

Lyrically, the song starts like parenting does. Trying to get the carseat right on that first ride home from the hospital. Taking one’s heart and splitting its guts, which is what motherhood has always felt like to me, especially in the beginning. Like snapping off a limb to grow a new body. Stretching the limits of sinew and skin so that when we look at ourselves naked we see first the war of birth and then everything else. (Anyone who has any metaphoric sense knows that Adam’s rib was really Eve’s. That she broke it to make, not her lover, but her child.)

Because isn’t that what we do? We break our bodies to make new ones. And then spend eighteen years slowly learning how to live without some of our bones.

How to walk without a femur.

Speak with missing teeth.

Open pickle jars without a carpus…

And my shoes took me so many miles and they never wore out
My worried shoes

The night before we flew to Boston, Archer opened the letters I wrote him when I was pregnant with him nineteen years ago. I was afraid of what they would say and by proxy so was he but he wanted to open them before he left and he wanted to do it together and how was I to say no to a moment I designed in September of 2004 when I wrote do not open until you’re 18 next to the date.

He didn’t want to rip the first envelope. Asked me to do it for him. Felt bad breaking the seal. But as soon as I dragged my nail against the corner he took it back. Just needed me to get it started. (He opened the others on his own.)

He unfolded the letters one by one and read them to himself before passing them to me. Both of us reading each other’s faces for clues on how the other was feeling about a very specific kind of time travel. (I didn’t want to know what he was reading I only wanted to know what he was reading I didn’t want to know what he was reading I only wanted to know.)

My ah ah worried shoes
My ah ah worried shoes…

The letters said nothing.

They said everything, too, but they also said nothing. They were full of promises and projections and hopes for the future of the child I was carrying. They read like the letters of a little girl writing to grown man because that is what they were.

And my heart broke for pre-motherhood-me in a way I still can’t quite articulate — the banality of hope. Of words like Mommy which is what I assumed my children would call me but never did. How is anyone to know before she has children whether she will be a Mommy or a Mama or a Mom.

And my heart broke for Hal, too. Who I loved so much in those days. Who I assumed would be alive when Archer turned 18. And 17 and 16 and 15 and 14. Who I wrote about in the letters — always using we instead of me.

Even though I was the only one who wrote them.

I made a mistake and I never forgot
I tied knots in the laces of
My ah ah worried shoes

We arrived in Boston on a Sunday night. Woke up Monday morning to shop for his dorm. I ordered his bedding and mailed it to school over the summer but everything else we had planned to buy when we got there. So that is what we did. Went aisle by aisle at the nearest Target, filled two roller baskets full of miscellaneous all-of-the-above. Carried it back to our hotel. Spent the next day walking in circles around the city, breaking for ice cream and coffee in The Common, watching squirrels and ducks and the people who came to feed them. Doing that thing that people do when they know they need to break up but aren’t ready to do it just yet. Craning our necks towards each other’s silence, knees touching. Swallow, fidget, sigh.

The night before he moved into his dorm we went to dinner and I tried to say all of the things I couldn’t say earlier that day. All of the things I knew I wouldn’t have time to say in the short window between “family orientation” and “family goodbyes.”

Instead, we ate oysters.

Left room for dessert.

Walked home from the restaurant.

Couldn’t sleep.

And with every step that I'd take I'd remember my mistake
As I marched further and further away

In my worried shoes

The next day we moved him in. Dragged suitcases and duffel bags and a guitar case down West Street towards Tremont Street to Boylston. Taking breaks to readjust and check in with each other.

“I have an extra hand can I help you?”

“Nah. I got it.”

His dorm room was on the eighth floor with the most spectacular view overlooking The Common and at least a hundred centuries-old graves. Neither of us knew that when he got his room assignment this is where he’d be and it felt like coming out of a tunnel and seeing nothing but light.

And I thought of all future seasons — of life, yes — but also actual literal seasons — something we don’t have in Los Angeles.

How this is where, for the first time, he will see the leaves change.

This is where, for the first time, he will experience a falling snow.

This is where, for the first time, he will learn to live without me.

Call somewhere other than our house his home.

I printed out a few dozen photos of family and friends and a collage that Fable made in case he wanted to hang them in his dorm. It was a surprise because I knew he would appreciate it and he did and now they’re there. Some of them on the wall and others ion a drawer. Keep. Store. Give Away.

We unpacked him within thirty minutes. It was so easy it felt like a cheat. Like, did we forget something? Are you sure you have enough here to survive? Did we do this wrong?

In my ah ah worried shoes
My ah ah worried shoes

But no, it would seem we did not.

Some people just need less stuff. Want less stuff. Make shit like this very easy on their mamas. Are minimalists to their core.

We said goodbye in the lobby of The Little Building. That’s what it’s called even though it’s pretty fuckin big. But things can be both Little and Big and that’s all I could think about, arms wrapped around my baby. Face buried in the man of his shoulder.

I said I love you a thousand times for all of the moments I wouldn’t be able to in person before Christmas.

And then I opened my arms and released him.

People all around us were doing the same. Single parents and entire families with siblings, huddling around their freshman drop-offs. And I wanted to hug them all, too. Say I love you a thousand times in their necks in solidarity for having to say goodbye within the same window of allotted time.

“Parents, you have one hour to say your goodbyes…”

Not that time makes it any easier. I’ve been working towards saying goodbye his whole life. Have been practicing all year in front of the the mirror. Named him after Letting Go.

And my shoes took me down a crooked path
Away from all welcome mats
My ah ah worried shoes

It was raining when we went our separate ways. Like a poem, I brought my red umbrella but didn’t use it. Wanted to feel ALL OF THE THINGS in that moment. I have learned that I am the kind of person who has to. Has a tendency to get lost in the haze of “I’ll be fine” if I don’t.

I walked back to the hotel at first — because where else was I going to go — but when I got there I couldn’t go in. Realized what I needed and googled the nearest tattoo parlor with walk-in availability, then mapped it on my phone.

It was an hour walk away which felt perfect. I needed the time to decide what I would get when I got there. I needed an hour walk to remind myself that even without a femur, I could make it three miles through an unfamiliar place on my own.

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.

And then one day I looked around and I found the sun shining down
And I took off my worried shoes

I had expected to fly home in shambles. Everyone told me I would, including me. That I would be a wreck in my seat in the sky, all alone.

One of the old, giant pieces of luggage we brought to Boston broke on our way there and I had to fasten it with duct tape at the hotel. It is very me to travel with old shitty luggage held together by duct tape. It is even more me to insist on it being a metaphor and refusing to exchange it for something new.

I am this suitcase, is what I said to everyone who eyed it like “ha ha.” And that was sort of true. But also… it wasn’t.

And my feet were free to breathe the air
I didn't need to wear my worried shoes
Then I knew the difference between worrying and caring

There was a picture I took of Archer playing his guitar in our hotel room before it became my hotel room that I kept looking at on the plane. And he’s smiling so sweetly in a way that suggests he’s exactly where he should be.

It is how he looked the moment we left home and for the four days we spent together before I said goodbye.

Anyway, I didn’t cry on the plane. But I did spend the bulk of the trip with my face pressed against the window, following the moon, and thinking about all of the children below me, in the Christmas lights of bordered towns, growing up.

I’m a window seat girl, always have been, always will feel claustrophobic in the aisle, don’t understand why people pick the window only to close it. It’s almost as if people don’t realize when they’re in a plane that there is nowhere else they could be with that kind of view. It feels insane to me that everyone isn’t gazing out the window in wonder at what’s below.

Archer is exactly the same person I am in that way and whenever we’ve flown together I have always given him the window seat because Adam was really Eve and etc. But that also meant, on our flight together to Boston, I could only see the moon through his description. And the pictures he took on his phone.

People keep asking me how I’m doing and I don’t know how to answer that question and I sort of hate that question even though I can’t help but ask it, too and aren’t we all just asking each other that question even though we hate to answer it rinse, wash and repeat?

How are you doing?

It’s taken me all week to write this post, I think, for that reason. Because I want to know how to answer the question. I want to know how to explain what this moment feels like in case its helpful for others who are equally stumped when it comes to articulating the most expected of milestones. Either out loud or to themselves.

And beyond the dizziness of its emotional qualities, this is what I’ve settled on:

It is confusing when you get to a destination. It is often painful and exhausting and hard to know where to go next. How to get there and with what map. Its emotionally jarring to look back and a little terrifying to look forward and impossible to stand still when you have a full life and three more kids waiting for you at home to raise. So often I find myself looking either forward or backward forgetting that there are other directions I can look. And new ways I can look at them.

Cause I've got a lot of walking to do
And I don't want to wear
My ah ah worried shoes

There was a moment on the flight back to LA — 3,000 miles from Boston — when I realized that because I was alone, I had the window seat. And if I turned my head to the side and looked towards the wing of the airplane, I was able to experience my very own unobstructed view of the moon.

And it was almost completely full.

<3