Epilogue

I feel like everything belongs to me and nothing belongs to me.

I have all the control but I also take all the shifts. There is no resting. No reprieve. No overtime pay. No pay at all. No labor laws. Very little compassion. And, in my case, no strong arms to hold me in the middle of the night when it goes badly in my dreams. No one’s mind to help me solve the problem, and no single person who helped me generate this genetic code across this tiny little tribe.

The making of a quality human is the most important thing I will ever do. And the burden is heavy. It is not unusual or even the slightest bit unique. But it is the most important thing I will ever do. Though I buck so hard out here in the pasture. Willing some kind of meaning into my existence beyond whatever I already know.

I am still this person to a 23 year old woman, an almost 19 year old man, and an almost 13 year old girl. And I am the

unrepeatable,

idiosyncratic,

single-most eccentrically,

“come hell or high water,”

barnacularly,

distinctive,

maternal permanence they know.

They could not forget my mark if they tried. And, I assure you, I am not bragging.

If I stop to linger on the memories of failure, [and there are so very many], the sorrow feels like I am on the edge of such a deep well that I have to will myself back to gravity, else I risk falling, very far, into forever.

And I wander through life, with my arms full of the loneliness I created. Looking around for the next door to open, at the age of 49.

My body is trying its very best to treat me like a stranger these days. And I keep trying to woo her back into my arms. She is so beautiful. She always has been. She is so internally mighty and strong. On the outside, she has been feeling mushy. But I’ll always put my money on her. She has carried me on her back through multiple versions of hell. And I carry all the versions of her too. Some, I can’t even bare to look at anymore. But, I have to honor all the little pieces and massive parts of her.

My Aunt gave me some pictures of myself this year, enclosed in my birthday card. And, in a way, I asked for these photos. I’d told my Aunts I wanted to look at photos of my family. But I made that request blindly. Perhaps even for someone else. I had no idea how sad it would make me.

Sometimes it’s just too hard to summon the past. We think we want to feel the nostalgia. Like it’s going to wistfully swoop us up into the happiest parts of what we have lost. But then we realize we are actually homesick for the place we have not even established yet, right here in the present. And the loneliness intensifies. And that history is very sharp. Instead of a soft feathery swoop, the edges graze us like razors. And we stand there bleeding, feeling the warm stinging as the wind blows.

I looked on a photo of myself in the maroon velour suit my mother must have bought just for my 5th birthday. I can remember how soft it was. I loved the feeling of velvet as a child. I loved the glimmer of glitter. I craved the sparkle of a fancy, weighty, pageant-grade tiara. I loved the little cape-like vest that came with that suit. With a delicate little ribbon to be tied at the top. I was sitting on a play structure in this photo. With the best friend I had in preschool. Her name was Kristen. With a K. She was my pre-Cristen. You’ll have to read all the other letters to understand that. I was dressed up that day. My knobby, skinned, Tom-boy knees jumping out of the photo, trying to be rescued from the pose.

But we were a home adorned with low art. And the resplendent experiences just did not come inside the gates of our world. They licked the outside edges with a cruelty that didn’t get spoken about in the 80’s.

We were not a generation of mainstream emotional intelligence. Yet, we are the Generation X. And, today, we like to pat ourselves on the back for being “tough.” We define that toughness with examples like “drinking straight from the water hose and staying out until the street lights came on.”

Though we rarely take any accountability for overcorrecting into the present day and being the forefathers of a few generations of overtly (and very fragilely) emotional beings. And that’s because just beneath the magical glow of those “streetlights” is a deep dark secret. The child predators loved the access a generation of absent parenting gave them. There was no way to track a child back then. And though we showed back up on our front porches at some point, we were often carrying an invisible bag of the things we were warned we were not supposed to tell anyone else.

The fragility of the younger generations is deeply complex. Kids still get abused. And they are still the worst treated and most exploited population. And we blur it all with the imaginary alter-reality that shows up in how much we also love our children. We keep so much data today that it is almost impossible to know what’s real. That data moves too fast for most of us and the vast majority of young people tend to believe the stuff that sounds right and comforting to them. They also tend to believe they are individuals first and part of a society only as it suits their personalized goals.

I wrangled through the 90’s in the deepest state of untreated bipolarity. I got addicted, as many of us do, to various means of self soothing. I must have had a penchant for pain. My drug of choice was the chase of a spectrum of uncatchable love. The chase that never ends in a kill sequence. The chase that never ends at all. And each and every time…I picked out the shards of glass lodged deeply in my flesh, packed up my 40-50%…and I left.

I don’t like to deny the many times I have walked or crawled through fire and survived. But I don’t like to take too much credit either. There are a lot of people I hurt. So I purposefully tell the story the way I tell it. Or still, I avoid telling it at all.

Alternatively there is the deeply moving, yet somber version my therapist has jotted down on her notepad. And I also believe in the truth and accuracy of her account. And I am flattered by her description of my endurance and survival instincts. I am honored by her compliments and her description of my growth and perseverance as “very rare.” And I hold sacred the lessons and peace she taught me across a banner of flashing lights and buzzing paddles a few years ago. Inside the “torcher” of my “work” was the key to my prison cell. I love that woman. She was my emotional and spiritual guide, and a lot of times my wizard.

Here we are today. Closing out the last of these types of letters I will write. In November, you were born. And in November you died.

I have written you a letter almost every year for 25 years with some bundled reflection of my experiences that year and all the changed landscape of the life on earth you’ve been missing. I think I may have hung onto this ritual for myself more than anything. I have been dedicated to using this as a memory bank. As a catalyst to say so many of the things that we often lack the courage to say to people when they are alive. And I hope I never lose that. These mini dedications. Tales of being lost and longing. Lores of the pain and the agony and the passion and the love. All the things I have ever said to you - in life or in all these years since you died.

You were my adventure buddy. The other girl with the long blonde hair and Cheshire smile. We could sit in the tree house or the green house or any number of random corners of my house or the endless wild jungle of my neighborhood and make up stories straight from our imaginations. Chocolate glazed donuts. Plain glazed donuts. Fast food and your Mom’s tiny fast cars. Tire swings and road trips. A lost retainer in a dumpster behind the fried chicken place. Bag balm. Mane and Tail. So many cats and dogs. Cabbage Patch kids and porcelain dolls. Chiggars and mosquito bites. And so many swimming pools. Thank God for the swimming pools. The silly voices and imaginary friends. Riding tubes down the Guadalupe river. Walking along the River Walk. So much Mexican food. Prednisone. Driving anywhere we wanted (hours and hours away) whenever we wanted. The State of Texas was so big.

I figure a quarter century is enough of a certain kind of commitment. I look back over a collection of things I had to catch you up on since you died. And I know it is time to live the rest of our relationship in a different way.

Thank you for listening all these years. My deepest regret is that I can’t go to the mailbox and find a letter from you. Telling me everything you didn’t tell me when you were alive, and all the things that you have been up to in heaven since, asking me no favors, making no plans. But I plan to find you in other places now.

Yours faithfully and truly,

Me