Tag: mother

What You Mean To Me

I write this blog to have a conversation with my kids that I need to have now. A conversation they can’t yet join. I write it to put moments in a capsule. I put in as many as I can in hopes that some will reach moving targets at some far off time and provide some value to whomever it is that is interested enough to investigate this curiosity they’ve stumbled upon. My kids are the primary target, but myself and their mother are also considered. We will likely be the first to come back to these words and pictures and visit our glorious past someday that’s not nearly as far away as it was. 

   

 It can all disappear. It can happen in an instant or it can happen over time. What’s certain, the only thing really, is that all of us will go away. Each and everyone of us is renting. A hundred years from now, give or take, their will be all new tenants, each one deeply connected to the past from which they sprung, but each one also tied to a future we can’t imagine. The slipperiness of it all is easy to understand and hard to truly fathom. What’s promised to me is this minute. As such it seems important for me to try to truly explain to you both how much you mean to me. 

You guys are my life’s greatest achievement. 

It’s an entirely selfish assessment to be sure, but I have achieved things in life, everyone does, and truthfully, without question, whatever conceivable and inconceivable things that may yet come you should know that I’ll never ever do anything that will have meant more to me than raising you. What’s silly is to think that theirs some list somewhere, even if it were to reside solely in my head, where their could possibly be something listed second. Nothing would deserve to be that close to you guys. Your mother feels the exact same way. From the second we met both of you we knew we had found our guiding stars, our purpose and our direction. I’m certainly still capable of making bad decisions, and sometimes I’ll do things that will have some small negative effect on you. It’s okay, we’re all human and I hope you’ll forgive me. What I know is my path is the one you’re walking on in front of me. At times you’ll drift and at times I will, but I know it will never be too far. I’ll always walk that path behind you, keeping watch and marveling at your journey. At the paths you blaze as you make your way. It’s been my life’s greatest pleasure walking the path you’ve cut for me. 

I’m so incredibly proud of you both. 

It’s insane to think that you’ll have no frame of reference for what I mean when I’m saying it. After all you’re 5 and 3 as I write this. You’ll understand down the road. Truth is there’s a little selfishness in this too. That’s okay. Family relationships, the best ones, all the best ones contain certain aspects that would be hugely dysfunctional in all other relationships. Make no mistake, we are tied tight to you two. You’ll wiggle free someday, even though we’ll keep cinching and tugging, you’ll break away. You should. Hell, I’ll be proud of that too. Even through tears I’ll be looking at your blurred silouhettes walking away as you must and I’ll be filled with pride. Fear and love and anxiety and pride. It’ll be right there with all the other feelings. Including lonely and perhaps a touch lost. But I’ll be so proud. I’ll also slip the rope through your belt loop and it will always be there ready for when you feel fully your own and want to come back and reminisce and learn what it was all about and who we were now that you’ve earned and learned a new perspective. 

Language is insufficient to describe what you each mean to me.

I love you both to the ends of the earth. I love you past the ends of the earth. I love you across time and space and I love you in a way that the word love can’t sufficiently convey. 

When I was a kid I was cursed with parents who loved me. As a disaffected suburban youth this did not fit the narrative I was constructing and at times I rejected the love that was so generously heaped on me. It wasn’t a jerk thing. I was just not aware of what my parents meant when they said they loved me. I didn’t get that they were saying it not only to me but of me. They were expressing a thing that is far beyond what we know of love until we meet our kids. Perhaps others find it elsewhere than with children, perhaps you will. For my life, for my parents lives it was becoming parents. I can no longer speak to any other experience than the one where I become a parent and I can tell you that I’m so very much in love with the life it’s given me. The life you’ve given me. Sure, there are no doubt times when the business of parenting could best be classified as my favorite frustration. What’s interesteing about that is that in retrospect it all turns into beauty, even the parts that might feel awful to live through. 

I’m planning a long adventure that takes us all down the path as far as we can go together. I’m aware that we won’t all be on the path together forever. But I’m also aware that we will be on that path, together, forever. Because whatever else may be happening and whenever you may be reading this you should know, the minute you guys came along you removed all the boundaries that I had assigned to myself. You stretched that moment to the length of a lifetime and proceeded to teach me how to dance on it, free of the burdens I’d imagined weighed so heavy before you taught me to let them go. You are the magic that makes my life complexly beautiful and you brought with you all the joy and love to last a thousand lifetimes.

We’re not promised tomorrow, but we have today. I’m so happy to be here with you two. 

It’s Alright, Ma, I’m Only Crying

When I have to stand in front and ‘present’ I get shaky. It isn’t long before I’m on the verge of tears and my breathing is off. Happened tonight when I had to speak to our board about our programs for people with special needs. Happens all the time and people always tell me it was fine and it invariably it was. I get through it, but I know this very real and very vulnerable part of me comes through. Maybe that’s good for my soul. It’s embarrassing, that’s for sure.

 I’ll tell anyone who will listen to me before I have to present that I’m terrified. I’m not. I’m not even nervous. I’ve thought through what I want to say or it’s fully prepared and just needs to be read. Either way, I’m prepared. It’s just that I know how I’ll feel when I get up there and it’s better if they’re prepared. If I had to guess I’d say it’s a control issue. If I can convince people I know in the room that I’m terrified at least they’ll know I was overcoming something. Perhaps they’ll have sympathy. I have high minded ideals and I live up to them, but in practical terms I have a politicians approach to reframing failure. I lower the bar for success as far down as I can push it when it comes to certain things.

A few weeks ago I read a story, an emotional one, at the Dad 2.0 Summit in D.C. It was a packed room and even there, to my exhaustion, I went about preparing the couple of people I’d met the night before with my mannered and perfunctory repetition of how terrible I was at speaking and how nervous I was and how scared it was all making me. It’s not that it wasn’t true, it was, but it was exhausting. I’m glad I did it, though, as despite my most sincere efforts to keep myself in check, I once again stepped into the moment and immediately began to crumble. I got through it, but barely.

 I think I’m doing more than just prepping an easier landing. I think I’m preparing them for what they’re going to see when I get up there. I’m preparing myself too by prompting them to reassure me that it’s all gonna be fine. I’m filled to overflowing in those moments with the ‘me’ that I know gets to hide in the backs of rooms, who takes comfort in blending knowing no one will pick him to participate. We have to make the world safe for ourselves and this is how I do it. But on some level, the amping up of my anxiety is me preparing myself to be exposed, naked in front of the world, the real world, the world of people in a room with me. Not like here. I can’t get ‘naked’ enough here, writing to you. See all of me. Know that I’m more sensitive than you imagined me, a man to be. Know how fragile and strong I can be when it comes to my kids. Being naked here, frankly, is my talent. That and the ability to ocassionally stumble upon a clever turn of phrase. Take these two together and you have seen the entirety of my artistic arsenal. That’s it. It’s what I got. But put me in front of people, real people and make me talk about my kids, or even my work, and I can’t help but get emotional.

Everyone sees nerves. I’ve pointed them there. It’s what I want them to think. But it’s not nerves. In a situation like the one at the Summit, it’s evident. I cracked and froze on all the parts you would if it was your heart breaking in public for all to see. Breaking at the thought of pain affecting those you love, at the memories of regrets and missed opportunities. Naked fear for my kids and the common everyday tragedies they’ll endure even if there life is charmed. Those cracks in my voice and the tears that well up at those times are all my love being put in the hands of toddlers who trade me all of theirs and me wondering if I can carry the weight of all their tomorrow’s. Of seeing that they don’t yet know that the component parts of their love are joy and hope and belief and desire and me knowing it’s my job to care for that love when it gets battered, bruised and wounded. Burdened by the knowledge that love will disappoint them, dishearten them. I just hope I can manage the load long enough for them to learn that it doesn’t dessert them. That love can disappoint but that it will always be waiting to start anew and they will always be worthy of it. The love they’ve given me is bottomless and I’ll endure, always at the ready.

 

I should note, I’m also the proud son of the GREATEST dad ever.

I know this because I learned it from my mom. The same way I learned that loving my kids unabashedly and steadfastly, loudly and proudly was the only way to know they would eventually come to understand how deserving they were of all of it and more. Same way I learned from my mom that a life of helping others was the only kind that was worth living and it was the truest way to find contentment and happiness. Same way I learned that she loved me no matter how many times I was hurtful toward her, when I would yell as a teen or go weeks without calling as an adult, a thing I’m still prone to do. Her love’s constance was a wisdom I didn’t understand, couldn’t until I met my kids. They taught me how to see all my mom was and is and always will be.

When I get up there in front of people and I start to talk about my work or my kids and I start to get emotional it’s because of this. It’s because no matter how much I may have pushed, no matter how different we may be, everything about me that is of value is rooted in what I learned by being loved and it simply overwhelms me.

Mommy and Joey, XOXOXO

Mommy and Joey XOXOXOThe most transformative moment of therapy for me didn’t happen in a therapists office, or even in therapy. It happened in a walk in closet that I’d made my writing room in the third floor walk-up in Astoria, where I lived. Truth is I was in therapy to be able to have this moment so I could move forward in my life and let go of the things I had been dragging around with me since childhood. It was in this small room, within a room, within my apartment surrounded by the thousands of written pages I’d been creating and hoarding for years in an attempt to understand who and why I was and am that I called my mother to tell her how she’d failed me.

I recounted things said without thinking that hurt. I recounted the things she said that were so confusing that I couldn’t comprehend why she would share them with me as a kid. I recounted the times I’d felt alone and unfairly judged. I told her of feelings I’d been blaming her for for decades. Literally decades. This wasn’t as long ago as I wish it were. I told her things I’d latched onto and refused to let go of for eternity. I told her about feeling like I was ignored and left to raise myself. I told her about how angry I was at her and why.

I’m pretty good with words. Not to brag, but I have a pretty good vocabulary and the ability to take thoughts and convert them into succinct and coherent and downright concise sentences that cut to the heart of what I’m trying to say. At the beginning of our conversation I told her that I called to talk about the things that were between us. About our relationship because it had occurred to me that it was our relationship that was in fact sabotaging my ability to love and to feel loved. I unloaded on her the pile of blame that I could never get past. It was fairly brutal and brutally unfair. It was mean. Anyone listening would have said so. Anyone who wasn’t my mother.

My mother is perhaps the toughest person anyone’s ever met. She has bravely stared down a life I’ll never have to. She’s been processing horrible tragedies since her youth and finding evermore reason for joy and love. She is the strongest person I know. You have to be pretty close to see this and I was afforded a front row seat that night in my closet, crying to my mother at a makeshift desk, surrounded by endless papers containing a profound misunderstanding of what turns out was my very good fortune of being born to the family I now understand to be my greatest blessing.

I hit her with every unfair punch that night. I blindsided her. She took every single one of them and apologized. For mistakes she’d made, for my pain, for misunderstandings that she couldn’t have known were still hurting me until that moment. She apologized and said she loved me even when I’d blame her for things that I now see she couldn’t have been a part of. When I called and started swinging wildly and emotionally she let her guard down and allowed me to punch away, telling me she was sorry, telling me I was brave for confronting her, telling me that I deserved better. It wasn’t a lie. She meant it. Despite giving me EVERYTHING and being blamed for things that weren’t hers to own she heard not an angry and aggressive and unfair man treating her poorly. She heard her son hurting. She heard her little boy screaming and crying that it wasn’t fair. And she took it all. To make me feel better. She let me know that it was okay to blame her, even if it wasn’t her fault, because she was mom and I would always be her boy.

I grew up fully in that moment. Seriously. I can tell you when I emotionally became fully a man and it was that night. I knew almost immediately upon expressing my pent up feelings that they had tricked me. Wisely. My feelings made me blame the one person strong enough to handle my impetuousness and bullying if I ever chose to unload it. The one person that could guide me to where I needed to go.

By the end of the conversation she was crying with me. She was telling me about her pain and letting me know I wasn’t alone. Letting me know that I would always have someone who would understand. Her. Mom. She healed me that night. The cuts that bled at ten, the ones that mean everything to a kid, I had bandaged. Being a sensitive kid at heart, naturally the bleeding continued and instead of allowing these wounds to heal, instead of cleaning them and caring form them, I just kept applying more and more bandages every time the blood seeped through. Never healing, always covering up and hoping my cuts would one day stop bleeding through. But that’s not how it works. You can’t heal that way. You can only hide. That day my mother held my hand like I was a child and promised me that even though it might hurt, she was going to tear off my bandages and clean them up so I could heal properly. So I could put down the load I’d been carrying and move on.

I emerged from that conversation a changed and healed person ready to take on the next phase of my life. It just in time as I was about to meet the woman that has since become a hero to both me and our sons. My mother gave me life, love and security and when I misplaced her gifts she dove into the hole I was drowning in and rescued me, despite my resistance.

I love you, mom. Thank you.