I have been writing in a journal – paper and pen – with my arthritic hand. No one can read my chicken scratch, not even me. Today someone showed me a tablet where you can write and it transfers to a file, to a text, to a message and I thought, yeah right, no one could read my handwriting – including me.
But despite the fact that I’ve been doing this new writing, in a friend’s studio, and I’m entertaining myself by trying to write my thoughts out longhand instead with the channel I’ve cultivated between me and a keyboard for 40 years, I still don’t know exactly what it is I want to say.
I’ll tell you, I’ve been being gentle with myself about how much performance and product I need to feel good. So much so, that my gentle has translated into what I want to ingest. I can’t watch violent films or psychological thrillers or anything that seems confrontational.
Yet today, I realized I’m the one in slasher mode.
Last week, I called my ex husband to say hi, and then text him that I had called him when he didn’t pick up the call, and when he didn’t respond to the text, I decided, after nearly two decades, to delete his contact. And that felt final enough. (Note: I had also called him back in July for his birthday, and no response.)
Don’t fault me because I’m slow.
This week, I got a text from two friends of my other ex – the one who made my life miserable as she fought me in court to be the kind of parent that she never would be. I felt the need to set a boundary with them – because of their ability to feed information to my ex’s family – thinking to myself about my ex (who is now deceased) “you don’t get to claim you’re a parent, when you never acted like one and your family doesn’t get to dictate the terms of engagement when there is none” – instead, I text that I don’t want information about me or Tin shared with her family, I hope y’all could respect my position.
I feel like I’ve accreted so much baggage and some of it has been hanging on for too long. For some reason, I thought it was all mine to carry. And I keep showing up as the one who is smiling and dialing, and finally, I said to myself – nah – I don’t want to carry this anymore.
This weekend is my son’s 16th Homecoming Anniversary, and I put together a photo album of some of my favorite photos of him – 125 photos in I had to stop, because there are actually thousands of photos that are my favorite. I wrote him a letter to put in the album and said – “No one could have told us what being a family would be like; I hope when you look back on our life together, you realize that you and I have created a brilliant plot twist in each of our family narratives. Together, we have accompanied each other on a holy journey to foil generations of poor decision making, bad parenting, and unconscious harm whether through addiction or disconnection.”
So, abracadabra – I create as I speak.
Then, I took a walk with a friend and expressed some of this to her, and she shared one of her favorite lines from a movie – Postcards from the Edge:
Lowell: I don’t know your mother, but I’ll tell you something. She did it to you and her mother did it to her and back and back and back all the way to Eve and at some point you just say, “Fuck it, I start with me.”
I think I’ll get that on a tee shirt – fuck it, I start with me.
[Thank you for reading my writing; I love hearing from you
and would love to gather your responses here, instead of on social media.
Note: emojis show up as a ?? on my site.]