Summer love
And a discount code for my last class until fall, Writing Recovery
The last seminar I’m offering until fall is Writing Recovery, and I totally blanked on advertising it, even though I am really really looking forward to spending June 3— which marks three years of sobriety for me—with all of you!
Please come and please spread the word. This class is not only for those writing through recovery from addiction. It’s for anyone recovering from upheaval, whether related to health, depression, divorce, loss, motherhood, burnout, and so on. We will sink into juicy writing prompts and quiet writing time, and have space for discussion and connection. Sign up here.
Oh! And if you’re a paid subscriber, there’s a $25 discount for you to use toward this class behind the paywall below. If you’re a person who wants to attend this seminar but can’t afford it, reply to this post– I have a couple free and sliding spots.
I visited the ocean this week, just for a few days, here on the California coast, and I was struck my how agonizingly otherworldly it is to just face the sea. How had I forgotten? How disconnected I was from the movement of the tides, the crashing sounds, the brine, the utter patience of it all. Maybe it’s because I’m still meditating on my conversation with Suzanne Scanlon. Maybe it’s just the edge of summer. But I cannot stop thinking about how painfully spiritual the experience of looking at the horizon is.
Maybe, too, it’s that my daughter is turning 9 this weekend (mothers laugh and nod in recognition). As I write this, I am for a few hours more away from her, from my family, my home, contemplating everything that has come before this exact moment in my life, and everything that might come after. Time has slowed, not just because of the ocean, but because of her.
This is the last year my daughter will be a single-digit age— the kind of thing from which mothers make heavy meaning. The last year she will be on the edge of tweendom, still slightly removed from adolescence, the bridge to adulthood. The last year before a slippery slope of proper girlhood and further movement into the world, beyond my reach. For now, she’s still slightly mine, even though she is and always has been decidedly her own, a fact that still astonishes and makes meaning for me, all on its own.
I wrote in my book Touched Out that mothers often cry on birthdays because we mark time in mournful ways— as years we have lost our children to the world, this world. It’s the kind of mourning, though, that’s limned with joy and gratitude and even relief—for the time we can spend away, or just in our minds, as our own selves, and for what and who our children become, in spite of our imperfections as parents.
But there are ways in which my children getting older has not only made us all more ourselves, but made us belong to each other more than we did when they fed off my body, when they needed me so desperately. We enjoy each other’s company now, make each other laugh, teach each other. We choose each other, deliberately.
I think sometimes about the idea that parents are not supposed to be their child’s friend, and I scoff. I think about this because, when I was a kid, the line between parent and child was so blurry, so confused, that I lost the ability to understand myself as a child, which has at times made it hard for me to understand myself as an adult. So, I know what people are saying when they talk about the dangers of this kind of relationship.
And yet, there is a difference I’m finding, as my children age, and as I do, in being a child’s friend— their confidant, their sounding board, their chuckle buddy— and failing to be their mother. The line is at times hard to tread, but as my kids age, it feels less so. I understand better the contours of our relationship, impossibly deep and complicated and imperfect and ample, and sometimes, crushingly sublime. Over time, I fret less about that last bit, because isn’t that what love is, a little too much to take in?
My daughter’s birthday marks the start of summer— my favorite season as a California person. The only time when the ocean is warm enough to visit. When we sweat and swim and drink the sun, repeat. My youngest kid’s birthday marks the start of winter, though you wouldn’t know it if you met these kids. But they are each harbingers of seasons in their own ways. They are that powerful to me, that divine.