Last Trip

Monday, March 27th 

This post is nine and a half years in the making. It is almost impossible to write, my mind skitters off, as it has much of this great year of change, from saying anything. Perhaps out of superstition. Perhaps out of terror. Perhaps because I can hardly believe we have arrived here, in this place where my boy is almost a man, where we get to become in charge, fully, of our own lives.

For nine years, J. and I have traveled across the country so he could see his father. I imagine I am supposed to see this as punishment. Punishment for leaving at 29, moving into my own apartment. Punishment for leaving again at 36. I have known punishment for almost 25 years--for existing, for having an opinion, for desiring anything at all. But this has also been a kind of punishment for my boy. 

I cannot bring myself to calculate how many trips, how many miles, how many thousands of dollars. Maybe someday I will, but tonight, in that liminal space between dropping J off and picking him up, I cannot. My boy, my boy, my magical boy! How I would do anything for you. How my life has been centered around keeping you safe, how even now I feel like keeping me safe too has been an indulgence, a selfishness. But it hasn't. It could not be. When he was born, I knew in my bones that I must want for myself what I want for him, because if I did not, it would be impossible for him to want that for himself. 

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Saturday, April 1st

Denver airport, one thousandth time. I am alone, on the last trip back east to pick my boy up. I woke far before dawn, slept again uncomfortably on the plane. The sky in Denver is palest blue. I walked around all day yesterday stiff with anxiety. Does it get easier? D asked as we ate dinner, later. No, it just gets more usual, I said. This is the last time but I am also afraid of things going sideways. I am afraid to jinx it. I am afraid of the other shoe, finally dropping, all these years later. Nine and half years ago, I blew up my life and left the Great Lakes. Nine years before that, I blew it up and had a baby, got divorced. I have held myself together by a thread, stitched a life together, each time finding a better fit. Now what?

In five months, my boy will leave for college. He isn't going far,  just across town but still. D. will go to California, and R. and I will be alone in the house. The utter and complete center of my life will be an adult, will be unstitching himself from me.

These trips have been hard. God, they have been hard. The first summer I left J. in Michigan, I lost my mind in the airport, collapsed into a heap, hysterical and bereft. An airport cop came to inquire, and all I could sob was my son is gone. When I flew back 8 weeks later, J. was unrecognizable. He was wetting the bed again. He regressed so far in school his teacher was concerned he'd be held back. So he began therapy. So I worked with him every night, remembering how to read, how to to feel safe. When he isn't home, we talk every other day. Sometimes, it's mostly silence, nothing happening on either end except reminding each other that there is something called home.

These trips have been unbelievably expensive. In order to be allowed to move, I had to agree to pay for everything. I have never gotten a cent of child support. Every flight, hotel, medical cost, I have paid for. I have stayed in a job that makes me, sometimes, want to weep. And we have gone to court countless times--once, to ask that J. not have to travel so much. Another time, when my father died and my ex changed his mind and demanded we change all of our travel plans because he would miss Christmas. I never got to say goodbye to my father, and paid tens of thousands in court costs.  I have had exactly two Christmases with J. since birth. Then again after we didn't travel in March 2020, and when his father promised he'd pick J. up but changed his mind and took me to court instead. I have been threatened with  libel for what I write here, though there are no names. Attorneys have argued the First Amendment in family court on my behalf. I have been told I am a terrible mother, that I am an overbearing mother, that I am a parental alienating twat. My ex has printed out my entire Twitter feed, entire blogs. I cannot bring myself to count either the trips or how much it cost, but likely this has cost more that both of my first two houses, as if I had bought them in cash. I am not rich.

I have spent countless hours walking Lake Michigan beaches, dune woods, in airport hotels and beach-themed AirBnBs. I have written & published two books.I have broken down in airports because of flight cancellations, delays, exhaustion. I have held J.'s hand, let him sleep in my lap, shared a water bottle and both gotten terribly ill with the flu. 

Does it get any easier? I feel like it should. That after nine and a half years, I would be fine with this. That I should trust that things work out. R. and I were talking about the boys going to college, and he kept saying everything will work out. He truly believes it, and I know he believes, a little, that I am choosing to be anxious. To mistrust the universe. Maybe I am. But I do not how how to not be on guard because that's what abuse teaches you. In my twenties and early thirties, I would drive to Lake Michigan because it was the only place I could quiet my anxiety. I have loved my boy with the same ferocity of the Lake in a storm. 

And now, I am flying toward a more permanent goodbye with the Lake, with these nine years. My boy was eight and half when we moved west. He is almost 18. He is my heart, walking around outside my body. And I know I am also saying goodbye to this part of our life together--this part of raising him, of being wholly responsible for him. I would say of being able to protect him, but this is where I have always felt like I have failed. No matter what I have done, I could not save him from his father. 

I have done my best. I have done everything I knew to do, and felt selfish about everything else. I do not know if I believe having done my best is good enough, but goddamn, the white hot sun of my love for him has been at the center of it.

Once, when J. was three or four, I had taken him to restaurant for dinner. I tried to do things that were in the world with him, even though I felt so out of place, the only single mother I knew, the only single mother in the entire school, the entire restaurant. Or so it felt. J. was always incredibly well behaved, and I'm sure we sat there and talked about Pokemon or dinosaurs or robots or drew pictures. I was maybe 32 or 33, I was barely hanging on in my life. And as we gathered ourselves up to leave, a woman leaned over to me and simply said you're doing a great job, Mama. I have never forgotten that, the kindness of her statement. Even now, remembering, sitting in this mostly empty gate, it makes me cry. And how that's all I have ever wanted to believe. That I am doing a good job. That I didn't fuck this thing up. That he knows how much I love him, that he can move through his life with more self-love and confidence than I have. That maybe in my trying, he will see what it is to take a chance on hope even when you are terrified.

I think: there are things I will miss. Spans of time that I am completely alone, responsible for no one, every emotion locked into a cabinet. Humid cottages near Lake Michigan, May thunderstorms, how beach towns empty out in winter, the loneliness of Oval Beach in January, beech and maple litter in the snow. The hundreds of steps up and down Rosy Mound Natural Area to the beach, how the Lake settles in a crevice in the dunes at the top of the stairs, then spreads out to the horizons when you reach the sand. Airport hotel rooms and boxed wine and Lindt chocolate and the laser-focus of having nothing else to do but write and walk like a ghost in the landscape of the past. Pouring sand out of my shoes, my snowboots, my clothes, pockets of stones from the shore, the sounds of spring peepers and cardinals and bluejays.

I haven't been able to write for months, and then almost suddenly, I can again. I sit in the airport in Denver and weep and write and watch clouds scud over the Rockies and disappear.

The emotional weight of this weekend--this last trip, this last slog, this ending--has sat in the margins, just out of my field of vision, just below the horizon--but it has sucked the air out of the room. I am supposed to be planning a book tour (my third book officially publishes May 1!), but all I can do is work in the garden, run, do everything I can to not think, not write, not read. I am a held breath.

*

I have always felt like I have been barely hanging on, desperately disappointing everyone. But maybe, as R. pointed out when I was spiraling the other night, I have also been ok. At 32 or 33, I was a tenured English instructor, department chair. I sang in a professional quartet, was starting to publish somewhat regularly in literary magazines, had just bought my own house in the suburbs. I had two dogs, two cats, one preschooler. I was making friends after a decade of being isolated, was falling in love with everybody inappropriate to fall in love with. I ran my first half marathon, called my father sobbing from the parking lot when I finished and was walking to my car. But I also felt like a disappointment, like I had failed; was so lonely and scared and stubborn. I began writing this blog--or rather, the first of a series of blogs, because I wanted to believe, just for a second, that I was allowed to write my life as it was, that maybe somebody else would be interested. I began therapy, began addressing my eating disorder, was diagnosed formally with severe anxiety and depression. Once a woman in my church choir told me she'd seen me and J. walking to the museum while she was downtown for lunch. You really seem to like him, she said, as if that was something special. 

I run through this litany of accomplishments sometimes, when I am spiralling. But here's the thing--no matter how many accomplishments a woman has, no matter how much she tries and works and loves and does the best she fucking can--she's still a woman. She still exists in a patriarchy. None of this kept me free of being accused of being a whore, a selfish cunt, a cow, a terrible mother, a suffocating mother, again, again, again, again, again. I have lain on my back on the carpet and learned to leave my body while I was raped, repeatedly, by the father of my son. He would probably not recognize this as rape, as I was his wife, as I never said no, as I simply disappeared. Until I left. Until I rent my life asunder and leapt, blindfolded, backwards, into the unknown. 

When I was 32 or 33, the image I held of myself was this, or a skeleton stripped bare in the wind. All I had was determination, and the smallest, tiniest, glimmer of hope. I had privilege that I was determined i would leverage to make a life for my son so he wouldn't turn into a monster. So he could thrive. So I could live.

I knew the moment I was told I was having a boy, that as the mother of a white boy in America, I had a particular responsibility to raise a person who was gentle, was kind, who used his unearned privilege for the good of others. It was my job to raise a child who could be a compassionate soul who wasn't snuffed out by the white supremacist patriarchy. I have tried, am trying, my goddamned best.

So here we are. Nine and half years in to this new life, and a newer life is emerging. My boy is almost a man. He is going off to college soon. We will be lifting off from the Midwest early tomorrow morning, into the future.

*

I am in my hotel room, near the Grand Rapids airport. Tomorrow I will meet J. in the lobby and we will fly home. For good. Into whatever our lives will become next.

*

(to be continued...)