BECOMING A TEENAGER

Teenage years. 

Oh baby boy, I can't believe you'd be 13.  I can just hear you now. "Mooooom, I'm not a baby."  

I remember your brother and sister as teenagers.  Peter started sharing his comic book and video game favs with me.  Bethany let me talk her into watching "Roman Holiday" even though she thought it would suck because it was a black and white movie.  :-)

No, at 13 years of age, our children are not babies anymore.  They start taking form as their own BEINGS.  They begin asserting their likes and dislikes.  They begin to question everything.

I wanted so much to see you do these things, baby.  

It seems more difficult with each passing year to explain this reality to others.  In some ways the grief ebbs, but the isolation grows.  How do you meet new happy la-la friends at the local arts festival and then tell them you'll be checked out of the world this week because your dead son would be 13 this week and you still hate the world for him not being here?  It's kind of absurd, which often translates into others thinking I myself am absurd (not that I don't already think that about myself and the world!).  It's a mutual absurd fest.

After your birthday last year, I decided that I had to find meaning again for me, for why I'm still here, to figure out what I want to do with the days I have left.  So I began doing things, silly, just for fun things off my bucket list, like going for the first time to multi-day film fest and going to my first comicon and going to Vegas for the first time.  All interesting for exercises in the absurdity of being human, but what does any of it really mean?  Leaves me questioning everything.  Paris and Tuscany are still on the list, but they are just other places.  Making my own short film or writing my first comic book are still on the list, but those are just other exercises yakking my jaw of human absurdity.  

It sort of mirrors the existential angst I had as a teenager, too.  Maybe I'm just channeling the challenging existential stuff you yourself might be starting to experience in the teen years? :)  Maybe it is a practice of being an alive, awake, conscious human being to question each morning we wake and figure out a reason for getting out of bed and wonder what to make of this day?  The human epic of living creatively.

The human epic of witnessing the death of self when our children die.

One little ray of heART I decided to create for myself this year is organizing a Day of the Dead themed art auction to benefit the MISS Foundation.  We have a dozen or so artists so far, all handmaking Day of the Dead artworks that will be auctioned this Fall.  The proceeds will go toward the amazing work your Auntie Jojo started over at MISS oh so many years ago in Cheyenne's memory.  Tell all your friends over there on the other side I said thank you for inspiring their mommas to participate: Lucia, Nora, Maddy, Lyra, Liam, Theo, Kae, Aurora, Soren, Imogen, Heloise, Roku, Seven, Juggernaut and any other loved ones who are being remembered through this project.

I love you, baby boy.

I miss you with more aching than my body can take some days.

I wish I could do more than send you love across the time, space, life/death continuum.

xoxoxooxoxoxooxo

Momma