THE LOVE THAT BREAKS US
What strangers saw as scandal, I saw as grief.
Last week, the internet called me a child molester for posting a photo of myself holding my son.
The picture was taken on a Monday night after he returned from a weekend away.
There’s something devastating about realizing your children can survive without you, that they can be content somewhere else. Happy, even. And that the security you once felt in being their entire world was never meant to last.
My son is twelve years old, the same age I was when my mother told me she didn’t know how to be a mom anymore. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision. But children don’t experience decisions. They experience absence.
I’d see her every month or two, flying from Phoenix back to San Diego as an unaccompanied minor with a luggage tag hanging from my neck and a bag of honey-roasted peanuts in my pocket. There were no emails back then. No FaceTimes. No texts. We spoke occasionally, but not about anything that mattered. Or maybe everything mattered at that age, and I was just still too naive to see it. I was learning how to talk to boys, how to shave my legs, how to become a woman in a world that despises women, without my mother there to guide me.
I never understood how she could tolerate it. How she could sleep through the night knowing I was in another state, in another house, with another woman who wasn’t her. I don’t think I’ve ever fully healed that wound. And I don’t know that I ever will.
When I became a mom, I wasn’t prepared for how thoroughly a love like this would break me. How it would turn me inside out and make knots of my viscera.
Motherhood isn’t just devotion. It’s vulnerability in a form so all-encompassing that it borders on masochism. It’s handing your heart over to another human being whose entire job is to destroy it. Not because they are evil, but because they are supposed to. They can’t stay. And we can’t want them to.
I believed I could avoid the mistakes that shaped my childhood by building a life around choosing carefully enough, by loving carefully enough that I’d always be protected from loss. But life unfolds in ways we can’t control. And sometimes the story you think you’re supposed to have isn’t the story that will change you into the person you’re supposed to become.
I wish I could have saved my mother. I wish I could have given her the love she craved so that she could have given it to me.
Children can feel like our one opportunity at redemption in this lifetime. They offer us the chance to become the very thing we need to save ourselves, instead of spending our lives waiting to be saved. But redemption is not the same as relief.
Loving a child is a vomit-inducing free fall, and I’ve spent the last twelve years writing about it. Not the highlight reel. Not the version that comes on Christmas cards or frames before you own them.
The version where I’m trapped in my son’s bunk bed for ten consecutive years. The version where he demands my undivided attention only to inform me that his childhood blanket is his favorite member of our family. The version where I’m on my hands and knees, covered in somebody else’s blood and vomit, promising them that everything is going to be okay.
The joke that offended people was:
