Skip to main content

Owen


He's gone for the summer and I am left holding his big boy attitude and the expediently delivered, embarrassed, goodbye kiss, as I watch him walk down the jet way.
My heart grapples with the familiar vice grip of grief as the last curl rounds the corner.
I stand watching an empty hall, a blank wall, then nothing and I ask myself, "What are you waiting for".
The realization dawns.
Him.
I am waiting for a dark haired three-year old to come skipping back into my arms. Before the causalities of divorce and the crocodile tick-tock of time.
I have been waiting since the start of the capital D.
Waiting.
Certain that the next time I would have him back and "MOM" would roll off his tongue with adoration and abandon.
Staring at the white wall of the airport, I know that he's gone and I need to have a good cry and let him go.
This thing called motherhood is interesting. It carves so many deep places in a person, caverns of loving and aching.
My boy is growing up.
His eyes roll back in his sockets with careless abandon and I am far less brilliant than I once was. And yet the young man he is becoming is someone I would like to know, he is interesting, witty, bright and swims in a sea so deep even I sometimes hesitate to jump in.
I walk out of the airport.
The phone rings, "I miss you Mom",
"Me too, Owen, Me too".

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment.  It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float.  It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within.  It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains.  Eyes closed.  Eyes opened.  A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being.  It takes courage.
4 comments
Read more

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much.  It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall.  The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep.  But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy.  I am a woman who loves the spring.  I nearly live for it.  When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis.  I gorge.  This year has been hard.  Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally.  The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...
2 comments
Read more

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...
4 comments
Read more