#SOL18: Motherhood

The Familiar Falling Away (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. - Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost (p. 22). 

I.

For each easyspace, I have occupied and forward movement felt--grief nonetheless reasserts itself and some days, even two years after, I stumble.  Life after Rob feels cumbersome. The starkest difference between life prior to Rob's death and now is that living life then was effortless. I had no idea.

Loss continues to open me to new understandings. Now, unmoored, life requires a level of attention I did not need before, revealing the unfamiliar--especially of parenting.

II.

The image that tops this post is one I made of Devon running on a day we ditched school and work and I made images of Devon playing in the state park nearby. It was one of those fabulous fog days.

"What do you want me to do?" my son asked.
"Just take off and run. Here, take the umbrella."
"Okay."

Coming through the Rye (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I did not know that day would later be a placeholder for the intangible time that rises between a son and his mother. Rob had gone to work that morning and Devon and I had gone to play.  I tell you now years later, I am so grateful for all that the image reminds me of and the place viewing it opens.

That was day about love. I did not know that then.

Later, we would return to another field. That evening I would lift my camera and see my son running through the field. Click.

So much more was captured then.


III.

Being a single mom now is stressful and at times, tender. Without Rob to talk through situations, I find myself acknowledging the limitations of being a mom.  There's so much that exceeds my grasp.

This past week my son turned 19. In a few weeks he'll be off to Europe where he so wants to live. I wonder what Rob would have to say about all this? What words might he offer? What perspective would he share? The familiar stance of mother-son has slipped as Devon has aged. What is emerging? Somedays I wonder where we have gone. 

What remains regardless of all of the doubt and worry, tenderness and talk is love. 

Tell All Your Heart: Ferguson & A Mother's Heart

Another Mother's Grief (from M.A. Reilly's Collage Journal made on 8.11.14)

I.

Tonight, I am wondering what I might say to my teenage son who stood 6 feet tall next to me, unwavering, as we all listened to Bob McCulloch tell America--tell the world--that a St. Louis County grand jury returned no indictment of Police Officer Darren Wilson for killing Mike Brown. Officer Wilson discharged 12 shots at an unarmed teenager--just two years older than my own child. These are facts not disputed. Wilson fired his gun 12 times at Mike Brown, killing him with a shot to the boy's head.

Tonight, I'm trying to find words, knowing the inadequacy of speech, as I watched my son turn away and walk back upstairs closing the door to his room after telling his father and me he was not surprised by the outcome.

This is America, he says.

He sees the United States as an unjust place--a place of racial and economic injustice. He has already known the repeated sting of not being white discharged by white boys who enjoyed protection from their acts by white teachers and administrators at school. Places where white principals say, We don't notice color here. We don't see color.

Really?

White privilege is a fearsome thing.

This absence of indictment confirms what my son has told us he knows: America is the land of institutionalized racism. It runs through our blood.  A river that is centuries old. It is deep. No white sheet can hide such savagery.

II.

Tonight, I'm thinking about the long, long list of parents who have had to endure injustice when their children's blood was spilled. When their babies were cut down. When their boys and girls were murdered by men sworn to protect. I am the granddaughter, the niece, the cousin, and the sister to police officers--those sworn to protect.

Tonight I am worried that my son, a Korean teen, cannot count on the police to read his intentions correctly. To see him as his mom and dad know him.  Given the history of our country is it possible to believe that in a time of ambiguity a police office won't read his difference first? Won't read him as not white? Won't read him as other. Won't read him as threat?  Is he a young man who will be allowed to make a foolish mistake without it resulting in his death?

No amount of Abercombie & Fitch, Apple or Yankee accessories will reverse his status of other.

So what do I tell him?  What should his white mother say to him?

We talk again, after he asks me to help him study for an English exam he'll take tomorrow. After we talk about The Things They Carried and Romeo & Juliet--about needless deaths that span centuries and I talk to him as only a mother can. I make him promise me that if he is facing arrest, like 1 in 3 young men do in this country before the age of 23, that he'll submit. He'll lie on the goddamn ground. He'll put his hands up. He'll keep his mouth shut. He'll do all this to keep himself alive cause facing a white man with a gun could well be his death.

III.

Tonight I'm tired. Tonight I am remembering the original definition of courage--a definition that in the 1400s meant to tell all of your heart. Tonight I am feeling a keen kinship with mothers across the globe prompted by that definition, by the actions reported in Clayton, MO. Prompted, perhaps because I began to cry once the prosecutor mentioned the conflicting issues of witnesses because I knew with certainty that no indictment would be forthcoming.

What we tell our boys and girls, what we say from our mothers' hearts, we should tell out loud. We should tell all of our hearts. Keep safe in this unsafe world we've made. Work to make it better than we have done. Know our failure and be undeterred. But keep safe, first. Be safe.

To remain silent is to be complicit.

Losing Your Way

Calvary (M.A. Reilly, South Dakota, 2010)

I.

Pat, Tina, Robert and I spent part of a summer on the road, leaving Brooklyn and New Jersey well behind and making our way up the Maine coast and back to Boston. We had no real destination in mind.  I can't recall whose small car we road in that summer, but do remember it was a tight fit what with all of us, our stuff, and a tent--and now and then someone we met along the way.

There's something to be said for traveling without an agenda. Without a destination.

We had just a handful of dollars that gave out as we hit Boston and we spent the night trying to sleep on Revere Beach. The neon lights of the bars along the boulevard made that a difficult task. We traveled that summer with just the barest of acknowledgements that somewhere at the long end of August we would be returning to college--a different one for each of us and though we would stay in touch our lives would wind in unpredictable ways. For me, it marked that last summer hurrah as I finished college early and the year after would find me bartending at a local hot spot with my shiny art and lit degree in hand and living with a new roommate in an apartment that cost me $115 a month including the utilities.

It was in that apartment, a 3rd floor walk up, that my brother would leave a note taped to the door letting me know my mom's youngest brother had died. He wrote that they had tried to ring me several times (this was in the days before cell phones), but I was out more than home. We finally did connect and even now, decades later, I still see her hollow expression at the loss of her last brother. She had six siblings and now only she and an older sister remained. 

After the crowds at the wake had thinned, we sat together and I softly recited Emily Dickinson's The Bustle in the House, thinking about the many years she had read to me.  It was a prayer of sorts. A poor offering to the woman who had taken in a scared friend of mine when she had an abortion at 15 and couldn't go home.  Roe v. Wade was still so new. I remember asking her how she reconciled her very Catholic stance on abortion with Steph's needs and she said sometimes you learn to be conflicted and act anyway. 

I knew my mom had been so mad at me when I left home. She came back from Europe to find me packed and gone.

"You're just 18," she would later say.

The distance between us that evening at the wake felt large, looming, unbridgeable. I had broken something, I thought.  I wanted her back, not knowing she had not left--I had. It is impossible to understand a mother's love. I know now she forgave all my trespasses--she forgave them without me having to ask.

II.

A few months later would find me at another funeral--one my parents would attend too--a service on a cold March day with just a handful of people in attendance.  A friend, Joann, had died in a wreck. Her car hydroplaned on a highway crossing the median and hitting an oncoming car. A few weeks before her boyfriend had broken her jaw. The day she died she had been fleeing him again. It was rush hour and the pregnant woman in the other car--the car Joann's car had crashed into, died too.  

Joann's best friend, my roommate, would not attend the service. She was too sad, she said and certainly too drugged to get there. 

This was a time of such wreckage, a time that reshaped what I might have been, what I was becoming. 

I know that now. 

After college I drifted, unsure. No picket fence. A careless woman with careless friends.

Two years after Joann's death would find me married and teaching high school--a poor attempt at respectability. I was teaching Gatsby to my last period 10th graders and the words on the page resonated. It's that moment when Daisy and Nick are speaking and Daisy says:

"I am careful."
"No, you're not"
"Well, other people are," she said lightly.
"What's that got to do with it?"
"They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an accident."
"Suppose you meet somebody just as careless as yourself?"
"I hope I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people" (p. 63).

I wish I could write by then I had it together, but I know now that I traded uncertainty for security. Oddly, teaching high school English for a decade helped me to become less careless, more attentive, empathetic. 

And a decade of analysis helped me to become more (other)wise.  

III.

I think about those days now and then and realize that it's easy to lose your way.  
Perhaps, even necessary.  

I try to remember that, to bear that, when I look at my son.