Pantsless Weirdo

Dear Mama,

Happy birthday. You would have been 63 today. You would have hated being in your 60s, I’m sure. Still, I think you would have aged well given the chance. I hadn’t realized how little I have written here because I have written here, I just haven’t published.

This blog has 85 published posts, and 89 drafts. I wish I had written more over the past few years. I got bogged down in a toxic and abusive job, and the chaos of pregnancy and newborns and health issues. And, somewhere along the way, I grew quiet in my grief and pain, assuming no one would want to read more about loss and my grieving process. How many words can one person write about grief? Truthfully, I could write and rewrite these words, painting my sadness into paragraph after paragraph, and still not fully capturing what it feels like when someone you love leaves this life. Perhaps for that very reason, I don’t feel like I will ever be able to write all there is inside my heart to say.

These past few years have been an absolute blur in every sense of the word. Sometimes, I don’t know how I have survived. It is a peculiar thing to be simultaneously so full up with blessings and also stress. Not that I would trade it, not even the sustained sleep deprivation. I wouldn’t give up most of it, even the hard parts, because they are building toward a future life for these tiny humans who will someday be big humans who go out into the world. And I know that I likely wouldn’t have any of this—the beautiful children, the marriage, the self awareness, the ability to code switch, the house, the minivan, the closeness with my sisters, the beautiful backyard with the massive garden and the raspberry patch—if you hadn’t made a choice to break a cycle.

You decided that it would end with you and, fumbling though you may have been, you shoved us girls into a lifeboat even as you succumbed to black depths of an ocean of despair that had already swallowed up so many in our family. You gave us tools that had not been given to you and instilled in us a compass, and a kindness that was rarely shown to you.

Nine days ago, one of your beloved nephews died at only 41. Like you, he struggled with addiction. That demon lives in our blood, deeply rooted in the McGuire and Brown lineage, stretching back generations. That penchant for wrapping ourselves in the warm, manic comfort of compulsion is part of our genetic makeup. Some in our family clung feverishly to a rosary while others idolized substance. And often for many of us, we vacillated between the bible and the bottle.

You were not immune to this, and I know you had regrets about how much of your adult life you spent bowed in supplication at the altar of addiction. We talked a lot about it toward the end of your life. I take that box off the shelf sometimes, open it, examine its contents briefly. I am less angry than I used to be. I wish I had been less angry in your last months, or that I had been mature enough to set aside my anger and resentment to just enjoy that last stretch of time with you.

You were, like all of us, human. Fallible. Imperfect. But, in reflecting on so much of the loss that I have experienced and in standing in the gap for others as they process their own grief, I realize that you gave my sisters and me something that a startling number of parents don’t give their children.

Your love for us was unconditional, yes, but beyond that, you told us that it was unconditional. You verbalized, reminded, drilled it into our heads. Although you didn’t have to, you beat the drum until we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that you meant what you said.

“There is nothing you can do that will ever make me love you any less. Nothing you can tell me, nothing you can say, will ever, ever make me love you any less.”

While stability was often lacking in my upbringing—a hallmark of our socioeconomic status, if nothing else—you created a safe haven of honesty that was utterly unique, and drew other kids to you like moths to flame. Especially as we entered our adolescent and early adulthood years, you became a priest of sorts for so many directionless, broken kids, and a close confidant for my sisters and me. To this day, nobody knows the extent of my darkest secrets like you did. 

Because I knew that, no matter what, you would go on loving me. I honestly cannot think of anything more powerful than that. It is the single common denominator of all human beings, the basis for all religion, that which underpins life itself: to be loved for our whole selves, regardless of how broken or selfish or utterly human we may be.

I have learned in my short time being a mother that kids internalize all sorts of things over which we as their parents have little control. And that we have to tell them loudly and clearly exactly what we mean, lest they take a reactionary furrowed brow or frustrated sigh and turn it into a narrative. And even then, no matter how clear we think we are being, they may still internalize our worst parts, our ugliest moments, those times we are out our weakest and least graceful.

That I am so aware of these realities, that I can speak about my feelings and help tiny humans embrace their huge, confusing, and uncomfortable feelings, did not happen in a vacuum. Every time I consciously say aloud, “I love you so much” to my kids, every time I sit quietly while an emotional storm rages, I think of you. I am thankful for you.

Sometimes, when I look at my big brick house and my bright-eyed babies, I am speechless and have to catch my breath. Not only am I not in a morgue with poison in my veins or my belly, I am flourishing. So are my sisters.

I can’t think of a better birthday gift for you than that.