COMING BACK ONLINE

Kota, my love, yes, I am reluctantly coming back online after your 13th birth and death day.  The top photo is my birth/death day groan to world.

Your daddy bought me that beautiful sculpture in the middle photo.  It was something I had seen a year and a half ago maybe, but passed it up at the time.  Regretted it from the moment I walked away from it.  And with each foray out into the world, I'd look for it or a similar one again.  Never could find it.  Then, the day before your birthday this year, we walked into a little shop and there it was.  Daddy bought it right away.  I'm sure it is *far* from what you would have wanted as a living breathing 13 year old, but since you are not here -- since it is a gift in proxy -- well, this was the heART that came home with us.

We didn't either much feel like cake this year either -- again, I'm sure a growing and constantly hungry 13 year old would never have wanted watermelon, but there it is in your absence (in the bottom photo).  Was sort of funny to light candles on a watermelon, but it worked.  And it was yummy :)

In my reluctant return to the grid, I miss you more than ever.  I view the world with more and more questions and ponder the absurdity of it all.  Why some live and some die?  Why anyone wants to continue living in this ridiculous world?  What would you have made of it all as you grew and learned and woke up to adulthood?

Your daddy keeps telling me to stay in the moment.  Find the joy right now because everything else is illusion.  Stay with my breath and keep creating the playground of my life.  Some moments it is so difficult to do that as the world seems pointless.  The best I could in the days around your birth/death day was to escape.  Two films save me over and over...

"I feel so happy here. This place makes me feel flooded with love. The important thing is to have lots of love about. I was very stingly with it back home. I use to measure and count it out. I had this obseesion with justice, you see. I wouldn’t love Mellersh unless he loved me back exactly as much, but he didn’t and neither did I. The emptiness of it all." 

~Lottie, Enchanted April

"Any arbitrary turning along the way, and I would be elsewhere.  I would be different. What are four walls, anyway?  They are what they contain.  The house protects the dreamer.  Unthinkably good things can happen, even late in the game.  It's such a surprise." 

~Under The Tuscan Sun

Remember, baby boy, your momma loves you!

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