Growing Pains.

Dear Isaac,

I had a hunch I was pregnant with you at conception. I wrote about it because at 19 yrs old it felt too scary and kooky to have a feeling like that and share it with others. (Back in the good ol dear diary days). Your daddy was attending Ferris State University at the time and I was visiting him often then, while I was staying in Alma with Aunt Jenn trying to figure out my next bold move… Which was apparently becoming a mama!

Because of this “intuition”, I had a full nine months to prepare for your arrival, though it wasn’t officially confirmed, via home pregnancy test, until New Years Day, 1996. For nine months I worried and dreamed and grew exponentially curious about the tenant taking root in my body as well as the kind of mom I wanted to be. For nine months I waited to meet you.

You were 10 days “later” than your due date and those last weeks I was anxious and excited to finally see your face, hold you close and whisper “I love you already”.

Your birth changed my life.

Now, here I am, waiting until Friday, which happens to be my birthday, but will also be 9 months since I saw your sweet kind beautiful face, and the parts of that face that never changed since the day you entered the spinning world.

It feels apropos; gestation of a new human being takes nine months to complete, and here I am, entering the last year of my thirties, 9 months after the light of my life left the earthly realm, utterly and irrevocably changed, feeling the emergence of my new self, my new normal, finally sink in.

You are gone from this plane of existence. And your death has changed my entire life.

Ive been feeling pretty bitchy lately. I guess its growing pains. Everything and everyone has been pissing me off, though they haven’t done a thing. I’m just experiencing some misdirected anger, because I cannot, I will not, be angry with you.

I often feel, lately, as if I have been travelling this road of grief with everyone who lost you, on a fast moving freeway, and now it is my exit; the exit I will travel alone, along, finding my way home, to what remains of myself. Outside of everyone else, outside of loss, outside of fear and ache and sadness and despair and loneliness. The road I will travel the rest of my days, a road that I cannot take anyone with me, not even you my travelling companion, my gypsy boy.

The work I must do to heal and go forward is solitary; an inside job.

While I will carry you close in memory and reverie, while I will continue to share my life and my story with all those here who love and support me through good times and the hardest times, I must learn at last to read maps and navigate this new path on my own.

I am so deeply humbled and full of gratitude for the ride of my life; the ride your life took me on. There will never be another who so completely altered my course, who so completely captured my attention, who so utterly stole my heart and made it bigger and gave me joy the way that you did. Thank you for choosing me to implant your soul into, thank you for making me a better person than I ever could have become alone. Thank you for giving birth to the mama and woman I became. It seems just, despite the agony, that you would, in death, give a voice to the next act of my life. I will be your champion: I will spend my life helping save someone else’s Isaac.

I love you with all that I am. Whoever that will be.

Much Love,

Mama