At the risk of alienating all of you, I am writing about my son...again. I get to see him today for the first time in nine weeks. Nine weeks of his life that I was wholly absent from. Nine weeks that I was missing, removed. It was needed but incredibly painful. I thought of him all the time, with both remorse and relief. Remorse that I was not able to get through to him on my own, and relief that he wasn’t there causing and spreading so much ill will.
Today, I have none of that. It is like some sort of cosmic whitewashing. I feel untethered from our shared past and have arrived on the shores of Prince of Wales island, completely free from all the shit we endured before. That isn’t true, no one can be completely untethered...unless you are totally insane. Then and only then can you maybe be free of you and your past. An alternative reality takes over your mind. But saving that, we are all lashed to the past that we may love or hate, but it is ours regardless.
So I cannot meet him today with no ties to the past...he is similar situated. We both must move forward, burdened always by the past.
What I do have today is a new faith. Hope can be a fucking nightmare and I can see how hope’s ever present optimism kept my family in shackles for a long time. I kept doing the same thing over and over again because hope kept telling me not to give up or in. But today hope is sidelined. She is not running my life. I have something that is much more valued than hope...I have faith.
Faith that he has worked through his shit without me. Faith that I have adequately addressed and remain open to continue to address my own. Everything is not all better, but it is exactly how it should be right now in this moment. Faith leading us both to this new place where we might love each other better and more lovingly.
Hope is future based, wholly ignoring the past and present. Faith relies upon this higher level stuff, where I just have to trust that regardless of whether I am in the thick of things and up to my ears in a shitstorm, or having the best day of my life, all of it is happening for me and exactly as it is supposed to. Gone are the ideas that if something good is happening, that is how it should always be or that it is because I am deserving of some merit. Also absent are the ideas that bad things happening are a punishment. Things just happen, sometimes they are good and sometimes they are bad. That is life.
Today will be a good day. I get to hold my son. I get to talk to him and see him. I am going to do my best to just listen. Allow him to show me all he has learned about himself, life, Alaska and the wild. Let him be my teacher. He is always my teacher but I have been Logan lesson resistant a lot. Feeling always like I have too many lessons in that regard and most of them painful and never ending...
Today, I am open and loving and not worried about what will happen tomorrow. My feet and head are together and committed to being where we both are. Here and now.
It has been a long road to get here. This remote island in Alaska. One that takes a three hour ferry to get to and several plane rides. My boy is here, I am here, his father is here. We are all here for the same reason, to see my son rise.
After so many dark spirals downward, today I will see the best son rise I have ever seen, the one where my child introduces us to the person he has always been but was too afraid to show. This loving, caring, sensitive guy has found a way to have who he is be enough. And I am sure that my only purpose going forward as his mother is to hold him accountable to himself and to love him with all that I am. It isn’t new, but I feel more up for the task than I used to. I am no longer weary, but feel bolstered by the faith I feel for myself and for him.
We all walk a dark road in this life. The secret is to keep walking, despite what fear and anger tell us. So many of us find the dark road and think it is the only road. So we give up to wander the smelly, urine soaked alleys of this desperate road, looking for light. Light requires another path and light requires that you move onward through the terrors the shaded avenue encumbers. No road is permanent but that knowledge only comes from wandering in the dark for some time. For some of us it is the whole of our life. For others, our time on the inky trail brief and alchemical. We walk through the shadows always toward the light we know waits for us around some bend we cannot see. And we walk for so long within the blackness that we lose faith that light will ever guide us again. But like the dawning of all new days, the light comes. The sun also rises, always. Today, I am so grateful that my son shall do so too. And that I will be there to bear witness to the rising of my most beloved son.
