Auld Lang Syne

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Thanksgiving Week, 2022

I have been writing this post in my head for days now--three days walking and running and hiking through the beech-maple dunewoods, the small herd of white tailed deer meeting me at every turn in the trail, chickadees and titmice and bluejays, downy woodpeckers scrambling up from each high branch.

How do you say goodbye to a place that formed you, that has been my place of exile for nine years while my boy sits silently at his father's house? How do you say goodbye to the woman I was when I first came to Michigan--eighteen, so desperate to matter I could barely see straight--at forty-five, the checker at Meijer hitting the I acknowledge over 50 button without even blinking when I scan my bottle of wine?

When J. and I started to do this, I could barely stare down nine years--for nine years we would have to haul ourselves cross country multiple times a year, be hauled into family court, spend tens upon tens of thousands of dollars (we've probably spent upwards of 100,000 in the last nine years, if not more. Probably more. I don't want to count). How could I bear it? How could he? But we put roots down in Portland anyway; but we discovered what felt like home and what did not. Despite.

And here we are, my boy 17 and almost as old as I was when I came here for the first time, and he will leave here for the last time a few months before he turns 18. 

The battery on my laptop--the same one i've hauled with me for nine years--is refusing to hold a charge, finally. I have written two books and started another in these nine years, published one and can't say yet what's happening with the other. I have had my blog (this is the third iteration, maybe? maybe the fourth?) and my Twitter account printed out and put in a notebook and brought into family court to prove I am an unfit mother. I am not, in fact. I love my boy more fiercely than I love anyone; for my little family in Portland I will sacrifice anything. And what I have learned, the gift I have been given, have given myself, is that I don't have to sacrifice myself.

My battery keeps dying, i keep pausing and plugging the laptop in on the little stool by the wall, doing another load of laundry, packing my suitcase. Tomorrow I head to my  mother's house in Chicago, on Saturday I'll head back to Michigan to the same airport hotel I've stayed in for nine years, and on Sunday J and I will fly home. What will you do next Thanksgiving? Our boys will be in college then. I don't know. I am hesitant, afraid, to think of beauty in the future, afraid even still that anything good will be taken from me.

For nine years I haven't thought of the end of this season because it seemed impossibly far away, because it would also mean my boy is almost a man and there is so much I regret about the childhood I could give him, how I wish I could have saved him from all of this, but how I know the best thing I ever did for both of us was go leap, was to move us to a place that we could be ourselves, that he could grow into his own skin. For nine years, this seemed impossibly far away. Impossible. 


***

December 17, 2022

And then it is December, and I am back in an airport hotel in Grand Rapids. This is the last December we have to do this. I want to write about ths but i can't yet. I have just dropped off my boy, head home tomorrow.

We have been doing this for 9 years, this cross country travel. But in 17 years I have had two--TWO--Christmases with my boy. Most I have spent alone. 

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December 27, 2022


For nine years, we have been traversing the country—first, once a month, then slightly less. Airplane after airplane after airplane, our carbon footprint sprawling, hideous, Goliath. When we started, my boy was 8 years old, and I was trying to create for us a new life. I did, but it did not come without consequences, which were mostly borne by him and, lesser so, by me.

 

My son is 17, a few months shy of his 18th birthday. In a few days, I fly out to Michigan to bring him home and then there is only one more court-mandated trip between us and the future.

 

I am having a very difficult time writing about this, which is maybe odd—I have spent so many hours in airport hotels, Lake Michigan cottages, writing about this. I have written—and shut down—numerous blogs, each shuttered when my son’s father finds them (they they are anonymous, use no names) and takes me to court. Oh, he’s taken me to court about everything: stealing days, my father’s death, COVID, flight delays due to blizzards.Perhaps someday I will add up every dollar I have spent but probably not. It will be not in the thousands or hundreds of thousands, but likely over a million now. I work, and have worked, at a community college since I was 22. My second husband is a contract instructional designer. We are comfortable, but hardly rich. My Honda has no shocks, is full of hay, has over 200,000 miles on it. Etcetera.

  

But we are almost there, and my boy is going to college next year and every regret I have—that I could not be present for my boy’s entire childhood, that we have never had a holiday together save two—TWO—Christmases since his birth, that he has never had any school break to be with his friends or have a job or do any extracurriculars that might bleed into the time his father is owed—that I could not protect him from this. And he is almost 18 and I am almost 46—our birthdays are four days apart—and we are suddenly facing a future that we get to define. A future, for him, that he gets to define for himself that may or may not include me or his father or anyone but is his. Finally, blessedly, his.

 

Look! I want to write around the things that hurt me. I want to be a good girl and tell you what  you want to hear: we are going to be okay. I am a good mother. I am happy in my life. Which is true—because I am. I love the green mossy damp of Portland, I love our house, I love my husband and our little family, I love coming home to my best friend.

 

When we are cleaning out the waterlogged basement, I find a cache of old photographs: Jat a few months, J, blurry photos of my senior recital, blurrier photo of my MFA graduation, headshots taken in the backyard of Miami Avenue, me maybe 23. That poor girl—who was beautiful and radiant and so deeply depressed and terrified. Would she have imagined us here, almost 20 years on? Baby pictures of J. I can barely breathe, looking at them.

 

It is raining here in Portland; we missed the ice storm, having spent half a week in New Mexico with my in laws and my husband’s ex wife (which is weird, but only if you believe that divorce must mean tragedy, and not that lives shift and change and sometimes no one is to blame, there is no blame, just a new way to move alongside one another. Though I will also say: I am not always this mature or able to see it this way, and can feel hurt and discarded, and like I will always be the outside family, the non-family, the discarded piece). It is raining here in Portland and my son is in Michigan for a few more nights. Today I woke into a green-grey gloom; pearlescent and wet and muddy and birds in everyone’s gardens. We are moving toward more light in the dregs of this year. Christmas lights are still up, and the air smells of earth and woodsmoke.

 

*

 January 1, 2023


And then it is Sunday, the first day of the year, and I am again in an airport hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan—the same airport hotel I have stayed in for nine years, having gotten up at 2 am and fallen asleep at 7 PM and awake, unfortunately, at 11 PM. Tomorrow morning, my boy and I will board a plane (first class, because they were the only tickets left and because I had to rebook after Southwest melted down and caused me to spend one million dollars to get him home) and then another rplane and sometime in the afternoon walk up the steps to our house, crawl into our own beds.

 

Ever since finishing my manuscript this summer, I have felt alienated from writing. I haven’t written, or not really—I have a folder of drafts but my mind skitters off when I think about writing. I crochet, I garden, I run. J and I go on college tours and I think how did we get here, I think my god, he’s almost an adult, I think god I missed so much. I love being his mother so much. I did not know I had any worth at all until he was born and then I was born too. I love the man he is becoming, am excited for him to have authority over his own life, excited to see what our lives will be like once this forced travel is over (you don’t have to travel with him, my last, fired, therapist told me, that’s a choice YOU’RE making, you should let him do it himself but what else could I have done? I work to raise my child, to raise myself. This is what my bones told me I must do, and so I have, and so it is almost over). Driving today through the dun-brown thaw of early January, fog and heavy clouds and skeletal trees I remembered how much I deeply love this landscape of West Michigan, how I also will be grateful to unhook it from my life as a weight, to return only by choice.

 

My book will be published this May from a feminist indie press, but while R. and I were at Powell’s yesterday I felt a despair: all of these books and who cares what I have to say? Being fallow is okay, I tell myself. My garden is fallow, drenched in rain, groundwater rising up and seeping through the foundation.

 

And so I’m spending New Year’s day in an airport hotel, awake after a bad idea three hour nap and watching Monty Don and permaculture videos and dreaming of a post-dean life, whenever that will be. I have not had hopping john, have not done anything but ride one airplane after another, eat questionable cheese and middle-grade chocolate and drink cheap wine out of a paper cup in an airport Doubletree Inn. Here we are, in this new year.






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