Dear Isaac

The Bicentennial Baby Turns 50

My 50th birthday is in a coupla weeks. Yer dear Mama is getting old. I imagine you’d be cracking up over this milestone. We both totally would.

You, my dear, should be turning THIRTY this year. Your golden birthday, no less. Instead, it feels like getting stung in the face by 30 bees. Grandpa walking on this year added another couple dozen. I keep thinking about the phone call I won’t get anymore. That low register, “heyyyyy kiddo. How’s my bicentennial baby today?”

But I digress.

I’ve been reflecting a bunch as this year arrives for Paco & friends & I. I dont mind so much. I’m not crashing out about it, really. It’s all relative when you feel 1000 years old and it’s been 500 since you saw the love of your life. I was a young woman when you left. That is clearer to me now than ever. Thirty eight is such a tender age~ or maybe I will always feel so tender for me at 38 because it was the end of you, us, whoever I was. The end of an era, it was.

When I think back over these nearly 12 years, it’s really wild to consider the impact your death—or rather, my reaction to your death—has had on my life. It feels like every stitch was torn out & re-stitched with a completely weird thread. Because I have spent so much of this time trying to figure out how to survive it, I learned that grief is the reorientation to life without a significant person in it. We both know you’re still “here,” but I often wonder... am I? It’s like a compass losing its magnet. Its pole. Its north star.

It has really forced me to confront how much of my existence I had outsourced to other people. It’s interesting—I’ve always known this feisty spirit in me, but also this watery, soluble nature that dissolves so easily into other people’s lives and definitions of me that sometimes I can’t tell where they end and I begin. Maybe it’s my Cancer/Leo cusp in a tug of war, or a neurodivergent push and pull, brakes and gas, sorting out who’s driving. The same pattern repeats with Paco & I. Jesus take the wheel—but don’t tell me where I’m going—I decide, indecisively. :)

I digress...

Sometimes I want to scream until my throat breaks. I read about a musician who fractured his esophagus, presumably from singing? and I’m honestly shocked I never have. But then I remember... mostly my screaming is internal.

I’ve seen videos where they hook up mics to trees to hear the sound they make, and it’s a symphony. If anyone ever mic’d me, would it be this primal scream? A wild banshee scraping out the inside of her soul with despair?

Yes.

That is how it feels sometimes.

And that was how it always felt, for a very long time. I can still get there pretty quickly with a sad song, or when I find myself wondering how and why—which I have no doubt would go on forever if it weren’t for this mighty, indomitable spirit living inside of me.

And Paco, of course, making me laugh over the most ridiculous things.

We spend a whole lotta time talking about what we might be doing if you were here. Fourth of July. Father’s Day. Your birthday. Ours. Who you might be now. What you might like. Paco heard this song recently, and neither of us can stop listening because we know you would know every word by heart... and the little dance he does with it, too.

But then other times I think... What do I know? Did I ever really know you at all?

Beyond my failures—which are many, I know, I do—I keep realizing how much of what we call knowing another person is really meeting ourselves through them. When I think about it now, with what I know now, I think there’s a lot I didn’t see because I didn’t want to see... or maybe because I simply didn’t have the capacity to see. It wasn’t conscious and it was absolutely shaped by my own life experiences, by who I needed to believe you were, and who I needed to believe I was, so I could keep telling myself we were okay.

I think that’s the purest titration of the truth I can get it down to.

And I think I’d call that hope.

Maybe that’s all parents really have.

We don’t get a manual. We get whatever was modeled for us, whatever we carry in our lineage and lived history, and whatever we’re educated enough, determined enough, or intuitive enough to do similarly or differently, depending on whats what. Then we cross every finger & toe and hope like hell we raise resilient, kind, healthy, functioning kiddos.

And damn if I didn’t buy into my hope hook, line, and sinker!

Anywho...

It’s clear to me now that I was delulu and had no solulu.

Just a wing and a prayer.

Mama tried.

Sometimes I do wish I could mother you now, with everything I have learned. And, hilariously, I know without a doubt that I am now far too old to parent! You think being a young parent is tough? Wowza. Do I ever feel for those who are older…

In the words of so many 50+ women before me:

My give a damn busted.

When I think about how intentional I was with you, how I thought I had thought of everything, how utterly convinced I was that you and I were the best besties that ever bestied, I can only laugh tenderly at that sweet, naive iteration of me.

I REFUSE to beat myself up for it, though. (Anymore, leaning into my elder years).

I’ve seen that all the way through, as far as I can take it, to the very edge of life itself. And all it brings is endless pain and suffering.

I’ve spent my literal entire life being told by other people that I wasn’t getting “it” right. At home. At school. At work. In relationships. Until it became my own inner dialogue.

When you left, it became the only voice in my head. Crowding me out. A cacophony.

So I did what any good little mama would do (eventually):

I gathered myself up. I tended the parts the world taught me to criticize. I learned to speak to myself the way I tried to always speak to you—with patience, delight, forgiveness & the quiet but steady certainty that I was always worth staying with, no matter how I show up.

Somewhere along the way, I remembered that I am precious too. Funny as fuck, hopeful to a fault, earnest, curious. One of a kind & completely ordinary. Innocent and fierce. Push and pull. Tried and true.

These days I choose humor and humility as the lens I perceive myself— and the world—through.

I wanted you to hear it from me, Pal.

Love,

Your Mama