Two Birthdays, Four Graduations, One Funeral and a Wedding in the Woods.

a month of transitions forces area woman to reckon with her own

my grandmother’s rings on my hand

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.