Photo: My Dad, Storm, me and Nicky, 2000

Tomorrow my youngest child turns double digits. I despise mothers who make every seminal moment in their child’s life about themselves first and foremost, so tomorrow will be about Nicky. Tomorrow will be about celebrating ten years of beautiful life, honored to be at his side. Tomorrow will be his triumph of being, his glory of creation, his world changing existence, and my utter amazement as his humble witness.

Today though, is for me. Ten years ago today I carried my last child for the last day. Today I’m picking through photographs of moments gone and people we’ll never be again, and I’m feeling a little sad, a little sorry for myself.

This poem cracks me open every time I read it:

On Turning Ten
by Billy Collins

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

Flashback to September 2008, a selection taken from emails I wrote at the time.

But it’s made me so freaking beyond lonely sometimes, I can’t even tell you. I mean it’s just like they say, about how much lonelier you can feel in a crowd. That’s totally what I’m experiencing – when I was at my reclusive best I was happy with my own company. But now that I’m on the fringes of this other community, watching them interact and seeing their easy intimacy with one another – it’s not so much that I covet it necessarily. It’s not exactly a “seeing what I’m missing” situation, either. It’s more that it makes me feel intensely aware of my own otherness. My not-quite-fittedness. My disconnection.

Plus I’m freaking out about my decision to take care of my mother once a week. That decision in itself, while carefully considered and made from a place of strength, has served to make me feel outrageously vulnerable just now. I am not naturally disposed to maternal roles beyond the norm – even learning how to mother my own kids can be a stretch sometimes – I was never the eldest or the one likely to take charge. I was baby of the family through and through, and while I learned to fake a certain level of maturity so well that I even had myself convinced, caretaking will never come naturally to me. (Let me clarify – I think that the urge most definitely does, but the wisdom and tools and general wherewithal does not. At all.) So it’s not that I think parenting a parent is an easy role reversal for anyone, I just feel even less equipped than most. I barely know how to take care of myself.

“They don’t have to love me.” “I don’t have to be scared of talking to my brother.” “I will not become my mother’s permanent full time caretaker.” “God is not dead.” My head is filled with too many mantras this month.

Sunday. You don’t want to hear from me on Sunday. It seems like no matter what I do – everything from sleeping through it to creating new traditions to ignoring it to writing poetry about it – I still end up draining the septic tank of my life on Sunday. Not even Jesus would want me for a sunbeam today.

I just had a small family reunion – and believe me, we’re not a close family, either. But it’s sort of a tradition now that every summer my brother comes up from New Mexico, and my extremely neurotic, possibly insane mother says “Oh, I could die any minute of some exotic and strange disease that the doctors refuse to admit I have, this might be my last chance to have all my children together” (on the one hand, you have to understand, she never recovered from my Dad dying and that’s very sad. On the other hand, she’s always been a manipulative control freak psycho in her heart of hearts) and so we get together and eat potato chips and pretend to have something in common. It’s awkward and strained with moments of hope interlaced and I always cry on the way home because it just reminds me that I’m never going to have a close family but I’m always going to wish we were. So there’s that. My Dad was kind of the class and the sanity in the family, and when he died everyone sort of splintered and now we all seem (to me) about half a step away from a Jerry Springer episode.

And besides, don’t let my radical turn fool you, I’m still the same girl at heart that chooses her education, religion, alcohol and men (okay, well maybe not men) on the same principle – take what works for you at the moment, and leave the rest for someone else. Probably someone haughty and judge-y and who’s going to pick on you later for letting your kids watch television or for lying to them about Santa Claus or because they won’t get enough socialization. But fuck ‘em. Everyone has an opinion.

And I’m a big believer in the idea that we do what we’re capable of once we’re capable of it, and every little misstep and procrastination and failure and freak out in a person’s past was necessary to get them to the place where they can accomplish what they think they should have been able to accomplish ten years ago. I have regrets, I even have some shame about my behavior or my lack of ability to step up or whatever in the past. But when all is said and done I believe that I’m honestly always doing the very best that I can. Sometimes my best is crap, see, but that’s life. I think this same thing is true about most of us.

Back when I was a very lonely little girl always starting another new school, my mother began the tradition of half birthday celebrations. Back then it was an excuse to take me out of school for the day (making up for having a summer birthday and therefore cheated out of both an excuse to skip school and a reason to bring cupcakes to share with the class) and usually, to go shopping. It was a really nice thing that my mother did. (I don’t mean to sound surprised, it just comes out that way sometimes.)

Anyway, the tradition was marginally carried on with my own kids – my mother kind of made it her thing for a while except when she didn’t and I picked up the slack where I could except for when I didn’t. And generally now we mark half birthdays with a nod in passing and sometimes an ice cream. But the subject came up a few days ago that Khy will be 12 1/2 on the 22nd, which led to the realization that I would be 35 1/2 this month.

When Nicky heard about it he exclaimed in a voice full of love and sadness, “Man, Mom, you’re growing up too fast!”

Goodness, yes.

First, there are hamburgers. And then, there are cakes. And finally, there are hamburger cakes, which are so ludicrous as to be a beautiful thing.

*No, alas, Shane did not make this cake, though he totally could have. This was a Fred Meyer bakery special.

“A great leaf, that God and you and I
have covered with writing
turns now, overhead, in strange hands.
We feel the sweep of it like a wind.

We see the brightness of a new page
where everything yet can happen.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke

In the world for thirty-five years, now. I think I might be getting the hang of it.

Did you know that they’ve made a remote control car that can drive 30 feet up a wall? When I saw it I called out excitedly to my 11 year old son, wanting to share the discovery.

“Yeah, that’s cool, Mom,” he said in a tone halfway between dismissive and humoring. Cool? Just “cool?” It’s amazing is what it is! Oh well. He lives in a world where it’s just part of the natural order of things that he should be surrounded by toys that can defy gravity, pens that can help with homework and cars that give directions and parellel park themselves. Where it’s a matter of course to have phones that can go anywhere he does (remember when it was exciting just to have a phone that didn’t have a cord? Or movies you could play at home?) and computers with a great portion of the world’s knowledge right at his fingertips.

Come to think of it, I think he probably finds it much more amazing that I once had to live in a world without xbox. But maybe someday it will be him, yelling for his 11 year old son, wanting to share his own wonder at the invention of a working teleporter, only to get a shrug and a “Yeah, that’s cool, Dad.”

You know, despite feeling like a pretty technologically savvy person, sometimes I still feel like I’m a Flintstone living in a Jetson world.

But thirty feet up a wall!

“But I’m dancing on the Valentine…”

Driving home from basketball camp today, I had my iPod plugged in to the stereo and was subjecting the kids to my own musical choices. Duran Duran’s The Reflex came on. Counting back in my head, I realized that it was on my birthday exactly 22 years ago that my mother and I were in the Record Bar at Sooner Fashion Mall in Norman, Oklahoma and she offered to buy me a tape of my choosing. Having only just recently emerged from the world of easy listening and Willie Nelson that were my parents’ musical tastes, I hadn’t really had time to form my own yet. But MTV had recently come into my life and I really liked the jacket that the lead singer was wearing in the Duran Duran video, so that was the fateful choice I made at the tender age of 12. Simon and me, we go way back.

“I sold the Renoir and the TV set
Don’t wanna be around when this gets out…”

Funny how such seemingly inconsequential moments in a person’s life can string together with the bigger things. Maybe six months later I had Simon le Bon posters all over my walls, and my visiting older sister – using my room for an aerobics workout – noticed Simon’s intense gaze staring out from the walls in every direction and said, “He’s a Scorpio, isn’t he?” Indeed he was. I vowed at that moment to someday marry a Scorpio.

And I did.

“So why don’t you use it?
Try not to bruise it
Buy time, don’t lose it…”

So, Happy Birthday to me. And here’s to Simon, too. And the Scorpio I eventually married, because they are every bit as fabulous as my 12-year-old heart once dreamed they would be. As for the 12-year-old, herself: You turned out okay, kiddo. It was a good choice.