I’m writing this on Mother’s Day, a day that is filled with joy and also bittersweet for this year my grandsons and granddaughter have been given their freedom, the freedom to live without fear, without danger, without verbal or physical abuse, without the scourge that drugs bring into a home, without hunger or wanting of a different life, a better life, a secure and safe life, a home to call their own, a bedroom in which to lay their heads at night and know the nightmare is over, that they are wrapped up in the bosom of the love of a family who will do everything in our power to show them it doesn’t have to be the way it has been for so many years, that peace and freedom are theirs now, that they have a future they only dreamed of, that it has finally come, the day of liberation for them, a glorious day.
This is a Mother’s Day when my ex daughter-in-law knows she has lost her children because she gave up hope and lost the wonderment of the most precious treasure we will ever have, she will no longer tuck them in at night nor wake them up for school the next morning. She will never have the experience of making and packing their lunchboxes because she hasn’t yet and now has lost the right to.
She won’t be the one to help them with their homework, or watch them catch pollywogs, or try to cast a fishing line far enough or deep enough to reel it in and see what’s on the other end. She won’t be taking them for their haircuts or shopping for clothes for the new school year. She won’t be walking through the aisles of the supermarket picking out their favorite cereal or stocking up on popsicles for a hot summer’s day.
She will no longer put the measuring stick against the wall and mark their height and marvel at how much they’ve grown since the last time, even if it was just two weeks ago. She won’t watch movies with them or their favorite cartoons. She won’t watch them swim or catch a Frisbee or skip rope or slam-dunk a basketball.
She won’t be doing any of those things because she never has and now she has lost the right to until she sees a way to put that pipe down and never pick up that bottle again. She will have to throw her fiancé out to take her children back in, she will have to finally make the choice and decision to put her children first instead of last, to place them above the men who are willing to abuse them, to yell at them, to call them horrendous names and to hit them and threaten their very lives.
She will not have the opportunity to make them go hungry, for food and for love, hungry for security and stability, hungry for what children deserve, to laugh and be carefree without wondering what will happen in the next moment, or minute or hour.
A few hours a week she will see in their faces a sweetness and joy instead of vacant stares, she will see in their eyes that they hunger no more for all the things she didn’t provide, she will see peace, the kind of peace when violence has ended, the kind of peace real love brings. She will see innocent faces that are sated, that no longer ask why, that no longer have to wonder what is ahead because what is past is past and so they see into a future of promise and their own hope for what will be.
I know all of this because I’ve known her for eighteen years but also because I was once her, I was that mother she is now, I recognized her the moment I first saw her, her eyes were my eyes, her heart was my heart, her soul was my soul, her need to not live or feel life was my need and her pain is now my pain for what she has done because I did likewise and because I had it in me to change, I feel her pain and I cry for her, on this Mother’s Day, I cry for her, and I fervently hope she has it in her to change as well, for her sake and for the sake of her children.
This is our beautiful Mikayla when she was four.
This is Mikayla last year at fourteen.
Mikayla will be placed in a home where special needs children live, she will be close enough to continue going to the same school she has gone to since she was four and she will have the same teacher, the one who loves her like she is her own. My daughter-in-law will be able to see her as often as the placement home allows. We will be able to do the same.
This is Jerod when he was four or five.
This is James when he was almost two.
And this is a picture that was posted above, one taken a few weeks ago.
These are the boys who are not my son’s biological children. This is a letter that comes from an essay I wrote on my son’s birthday, June, 11, 2006. The Mediator placed great value on my son putting his name on the birth certificates and raising his sons as his own.
I sent the letter to my son’s attorney, she in turn sent it to the judge, the Mediator and my daughter-in-law. It was part of the newest deposition to be sent in the custody case, right before the Mediation Hearing.
My son was born June 11, 1967 at 11:13 AM. He came into the world easily, he waited until the sun had risen to bring in a new day. I was in labor for a little over three hours. It seems he was eager to greet this life of his, he took his first breath, and settled in as the nurse cleaned him, weighed him and measured him. He didn’t cry, he seemed content to be in this new world. As I watched the nurse do what nurses do, I wondered how we would fare together, this little boy and me, I wondered what would become of us, I wondered who he was, who he had been born to be.
From the time he was still learning how to get his balance, still learning how to walk, still reaching for things to steady him, we have been in this life together. Throughout his life, for better or worse, we have been inseparable. It’s only been in the past three plus years that we’ve lived further than 10 minutes apart. Sister and her son, Jon, and Derek and I often lived together as a family. We were all bound on this earth to be as one, we taught each other, we reached for the stars together, we fell down together and we rose to fight another day together. We learned who we are together, we learned how to love together, we learned of such things as loyalty and grace together, we learned how to simply be, just be, together.
We all settled in Sonoma, a town Derek has spent most of his life in. He went to grammar school, junior high and high school with friends that are still his to this day. Derek married his high school sweetheart. He said she needed him, that if he could have her he would never want for another thing in this life. Six months after they were wed she gave birth to beautiful Mikayla. Jerod came along three years later. My son settled into being a family man, it’s all he ever really wanted, to be a husband and a father.
Derek and I had a tradition of spending a day each week with each other, just the two of us. It started when he was in grammar school in Petaluma. We often drove the thirty minutes to the coast, we sat on the beach or on a large piece of driftwood, we would each draw something in the sand and the other one would use what was drawn to tell a story, we would watch the sunset and we would talk about anything that was on our minds. It was in a word, lovely. The bond that was forged in those years between us is so great that we are still the person each of us tells everything to. There isn’t a topic that is out of bounds. This has continued through the years, we call them our date night now.
One night when I still lived in Sonoma Derek came to my house and sat down on the front porch with me. He told me he had something to tell me, he told me he needed to know what I thought of something important, he said he needed to know what my heart would say. On that Friday evening I asked him what it was and he told me his wife was pregnant again. He stumbled a little as he told me the baby wasn’t his, that he was not the father. I held his face in my hands as I said to him that perhaps that’s why women are pregnant for nine months so things can be sorted out, so the truths of who we are in our hearts and souls have a chance to show themselves.
I told him sometimes we get to see what we’re made of, that sometimes life hands us an incredible gift, the gift of seeing if we just talk the talk or if we truly walk the walk. I told him that’s what this baby was, it was a measure of who we are in this world. We were sitting so close to each other our legs were touching, he put his arm around my shoulder and said that’s why he had come to me, he knew we would find the way together.
Derek told me that first night that he didn’t know if he could do it, if he could love the baby as if it was his own, he didn’t know if he could get beyond all the things that were bound to come up, his ego, his wife cheating, if he could look at the baby and know it’s not the sperm that makes a father, that being a daddy is being there with love and an open heart. I told him that was fair enough, that he needed time to think it over, that he should be sure because it’s a commitment for a lifetime.
We talked often during the coming months. We spoke of who was ultimately the most important person, we spoke of how babies are innocents, that they deserve to be born into a life where they are sheltered, fed and clothed, that they should be wanted and loved. We also spoke of the different ways people come to us, whether they be friends or family or babies we raise and call our own no matter what.
I was with his wife when she went into labor, I had decided that I wanted and needed to bond with the little guy from his first breath on so I held her legs as she pushed until my grandson was born. I watched as he was placed on my daughter-in-law’s stomach, I saw how rosy pink he was, how perfect he was, how glorious he was, how loudly he cried. He was robust, in all ways, he was bigger than life, he was a force.
When they brought the baby boy into the room after being cleaned up we took turns holding him. There were great big smiles in the room but there was an obvious silence that was hidden, and then we all heard it, we heard the steps coming towards us made from cowboy boots. I took in a big breath and held it, tears formed in my eyes until they overflowed my cheeks, I knew who it was. Derek came into the room, he walked over to me and kissed my cheek, he walked over to his wife and kissed her forehead, then he reached down and picked up little James Ray, held him up in front of him, kissed his little button mouth and said, “welcome to our family son, I’m your daddy.” That is my son.
I don’t know how to begin to say how I feel about my son. There is, of course, love and devotion, there is pride for who he was born to be and in the man he has become, there is a sense of honor that comes with loving him, there is a swelling up of the heart as I tell this story, there is a sense of privilege that he came into my life, not matter how it was, I am and will always be grateful beyond measure that I know him, that he is my family and my friend.
Ericka has said this year that Jerod isn’t biologically Derek’s son either. The boys look completely different from each other, they have completely different personalities but being different in other ways, essential ways, stops there, it is obvious that Derek holds each of them in his heart the same, it is the measure of the man Derek is that DNA matters not, he is their father, no matter what anyone says, he is their father.
Derek and I had the opportunity to have another front porch moment. Five years ago Derek came to me once again and told me his wife was pregnant. Like the last time, Derek was not the father. We didn’t have to have a conversation about it, he said he would be this baby’s daddy. Derek talked to his unborn son all through the pregnancy. He told him jokes, he massaged his wife’s stomach, he read to him, he went with his wife when she had ultrasounds, he passed the picture around proudly for all to see. He started loving that little guy from the moment he knew of him, Derek had crossed the threshold of doubt into doing what’s right by innocent babies who are born into this world, he became the village that would raise them.
They decided to name the baby after Derek’s best friend who had been killed in a motorcycle accident right after they graduated from high school. Clayton Elias never made it though, he was strangled by the umbilical cord before birth. We barely knew him, we barely knew him.
It’s a sobering thing to say words over a newborn’s casket, it takes courage to speak when a heart is shattered, it takes a reservoir of strength for a man to stand up before the world and talk about a son that was lost, his son that would not be. It takes a humbled soul and spirit to weep openly in front of so many who knew he wasn’t the biological father and felt it their right to judge. It is a testament to who my son is that he never wavered, he never gave it a moment’s thought, he was there for the love of his son, a son that was his in every important way from the time he was but a glimmer of light that had the possibility to shine for the world to see.
I don’t know that there’s any greater hurt in life than watching your child bury their child, what I do know is that there’s no measure that comes close to the wonder that life is when it delivers a child to you that grows into majesty, that becomes the very light Nelson Mandela speaks of, that is fearless in who he was born to be. I am quite simply in awe that he is my child, my only child, that a woman who was so clearly not meant to have children got the bounty of who my son is.
As I looked into my son’s eyes that day I saw greatness. After everyone else left the gravesite Derek and I stayed. We sat on that grassy knoll next to Clayton’s grave and talked and we cried. Derek told me all the hopes and dreams he had for his son, how much he was looking forward to being his father, how he would miss him and hold him in his heart forever. He told me he would never forget the pleasure he had felt all those months of the pregnancy. He said he got to know him in a way a father knows a child before they have graced this earth, he said he would recognize him when they meet again.
I often say we are blessed to have landed in our hearts, when I do so this is what I’m talking about, it’s when life is cruel and harsh but we find a way not to build a wall around us, when life is dark with just a sliver of light, when being in the shadows is our safe place, when our hearts are ripped to shreds and our souls feel like they will never mend, when our spirits are crushed beyond recognition, when we choose, when we make that choice to walk with an open heart, we are the ones who heal and because we do the world heals a little with us.
No one goes through their life unscathed, we have had hardships and tragedy, we have buried loved ones and wept, we have seen marriages and divorces, and now we are in the midst of this custody fight but, for me, when the sun rises each day I choose the greatness of love to guide me. I know what is possible when there is love. One only has to look at Derek with his children to know that that is also true for him, that he has always chosen the greatness of love to guide him, that’s what was in his heart and soul each time a child came into his life and because he did they all will find a way to heal and because they do the world will heal a little also.
I wasn’t born to be a mother but I was born to love the man who is my son, I was put on this earth to know and to love him, I am privileged beyond measure to call him my son.
Thank you,
XXXX
My son and I have come so far, we were both willing to do the work it took to bring us to this loving place, a place of trust, respect and love along with a commitment to bring that to his children.
We are so fortunate to come from a family that filled us with love and support, who never gave up on us, who saw us through addiction and helped us reach the other side. My daughter-in-law doesn’t have that, her family is mired down in addiction and has been for generations, there doesn’t appear to be a light at the end of the tunnel but my sincere hope is that my daughter-in-law sees in this world a different way to be, I hope she will hear the lessons my son and I learned and tried to share with her.
I cannot say there isn’t a place in my heart for my daughter-in-law, there is anger now, there is such disappointment and rage, there is bitterness but forgiveness will come in time, Derek and I are committed to that, for us but mostly for the children, they need to know we love their Mom and that we understand how a life goes so very wrong, that at the end of the tunnel is love for her, and always will be.
In the Katharine Hepburn Open Thread she said, “When I’m cold sober, I find myself absolutely fascinating.” I have to say that I find the same to be true of myself. When I look at my life and examine all those many years when my drugs of choice and the bottle were my salvation and when I look at where I’ve landed, in my heart, I marvel at it all and I don’t lose sight of how that came to be. It leaves me utterly and absolutely fascinated, not just by me but by all that helped me to be who I was capable of being, it’s no small thing that, and I’m most appreciative.
When I look at the clear blue sky today, my hope is for all the mothers out there who are still addicted to whatever it is that’s keeping them from being who they were born to be, my hope is that they too can see the way out, somehow, somewhere, sometime soon. It’s a wonder what lies on the other side of addiction, if we’re only willing and able to go there.
I am so blessed, as is my son, for he was once there also, we don’t take what we have now for granted, we revel in it, we get intoxicated with the goodness of it but we never forget from where we’ve come, not for a moment do we forget.
A version of this has been crossposted at culturekitchen and dailykos
