Life Shorts with Donna: A Journal For My Son In Hope And Despair
Hi Friends,
It’s time for my monthly Life Shorts with Donna where I share a short life experience with you. An experience that I hope touches you and inspires you to look at your own life shorts and be inspired by what you’ve learned and the memories you hold dear.
It’s Mother’s Day month this May in the United States. It rained here on Mother’s Day but my husband, son, and I had a lovely, spontaneous adventure. We toured a unique art museum on a river and grabbed a delicious dinner at an Italian wine bar.
I am blessed to have my son, my only child. And it’s been a joy to watch him grow into the young man he’s become.
But … I’ll admit here that I didn’t like my son, Joshua, before he was born. I did not want to be a mother. I was angry at his expected arrival. I shook my fist at my tummy wanting him to go away. Of course, he defied me and grew bigger.
Then when I saw him so pure and perfect for the first time and held him to my chest, I knew the fiercest love I’d ever known. I told him I was so sorry I didn’t like him much before he arrived. I fell deeply in love with my child. It was like the corniest moment in the feel-good-movie-of-the-year. But it was true. And I finally understood the cliché “Love makes the world go ‘round.” It did for me after that.
In being an only child myself and adopted I felt like I never fit in growing up. I didn’t belong. I wasn’t “blood”. I had no blood relatives of my own. Now I do. And I do belong, and so does my son. We belong to each other, and it is just as it should be. I pass on my love to him in the hopes he’ll keep the world turning with it, too.
I started a journal for him before he was born. It traces our moments together with his milestones and historical times in the world. Tsunami in Indonesia. Hurricane Katrina. Housing boom. National economic despair. Japan earthquake. I plan to pass my journal on to him when he’s older.
My Dearest Joshua.
This is how I started each letter in my journal to my son for over a decade.
From 2002 to 2013. A time for a baby to grow into a youth. A time for a woman to grow gray, to lose loved ones, to know despair—and joy.
In celebration this Mother’s Day month of the wonder and heartache and bliss of motherhood, here is my first letter to my son, as a newborn—and my last letter.
“My Dearest Joshua,
I’m sorry to say I didn’t like you much when you were inside me. In that waiting place I couldn’t attach to this being who stole my body. I had no idea you would give me back in love a thousand times what you took away in those nine months as you grew.
But oh, how I came to know! The moment you entered the world you were the sweetest love I’ve ever known. In that instant, the dark void you filled in me for nine months breathed a fiery life. I knew then why I detached from you as you grew inside me, because once I met you, I would know a love so deep it would scare me in its intensity. And it has–-with a ferocious grip.
Forgive me sweet boy for not loving you sooner. You are all things beautiful to me. Light shines out of you with luminescence. So bright you are, full of shimmer and glow.
In times past, I have been held by the magic of blazing sunsets slipping over misty fields. My heart has leapt under a starry night’s embrace. I’ve caught the last moments of summer as geese fly overhead on chilly evenings and the bullfrogs go quiet. I have seen these things that caught my heart in pure beauty.
If I never see any of this again, I’ll be at peace. For I look at you and see all these things and more. And so, in return, I give you my heart–-the outpouring of my heart. Take it, for it is yours. To shape and mold and break a bit. But it will always be yours.
May you grow to be a self-confident man with a sense of adventure.
May you know great love.
May you always be kind to others.
May you not be crippled by past events but become stronger in spirit.
May you be a curious soul that finds yourself on great paths.
If I do nothing else in life, I know I’ve experienced pure love through you—and that I loved you the best I ever could with every part of my soul.
Every day I am moved by love.
Every breath I give, every heartbeat that moves me along–-is yours.
Live in beauty and love, my sweet Joshua.”
From that first letter to now, Joshua, over a decade later, I’ve written you dozens of times.
When you were two years old, I cried to you over the terrible losses for families who suffered through the horrible tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. Of people dying in the heat, violating one another, killing one another. I wondered about the dark place that resides in me. Would I kill someone to get water for my child? Would I let another child die so you could live? I don’t know. I hope I never have to.
At three years old I asked you why you must always ask “Why?” about everything. You said, “Because people have faces!” Funny, but true in a way. We all have a different face with a different story behind it that begs to be told. I wonder what your story will be.
When you were five years old, I despaired in my letters to you when bad economic times hit our country in 2008 and the American landscape changed forever. Every sad story I read hung heavy on me as we struggled too–about families torn apart through poverty, bankruptcy, layoffs, and divorce. And I realized we were the lucky ones. All I had in the world was here. We still had warm beds to sleep in, food on the table, family, and friends–-and above all, love.
And when I spent a year watching my mother slowly fade away from cancer, you were the hope that kept me going. I cared for her as a child then I returned home to care for you–-my child. You helped fill that terrible loss that changes a daughter forever. I struggled to define the person I was without my mother beside me, while I had to be a mother beside you.
I could never again share the wonders of you with my mom. You stared at a family photo of her when you were six years old and told me “Mom, it doesn’t feel like we’re a family anymore with Grammy gone. She was such a big part of our life and now there is only a little bit left.”
But I discovered that a little bit left can grow again.
Trying to help you understand the world is complex as I don’t quite understand it myself. In the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting when you were nine years old, you turned off the news and escaped in a book to erase the thoughts in your head about the tragedy. You told me, “Mom, that man who shot them not only took away their dreams, but the dreams of their loved ones, too.”
You are so curious about so much and eager to tell me not to squelch your curiosity. You once said you believed “Heaven was real until they invented planes, because now the planes poke through the clouds and disturb the angels.”
Someday my letters will pass to you, but not yet. It’s time to stop filling my journal with them as you become ten years old. It’s time to separate a bit. And you are still defining yourself.
Live in love, my dearest Joshua.
***
I don’t know yet, Joshua, who you fully are now at 21, this person you are becoming. But I love watching you unfold as a creative, fun, kind, and adventurous young man.
I can’t wait to see more.
Love, your mom