It Is May 1998
Dear Me,
It is May 1998. Right now you are merely 17 but you've survived enough hardship to make you a bona fide adult, if that's how we're counting. Keep going. It will get worse before it gets better, but I promise it will get better. Some day you will soar.
In the meantime, I hope you'll suffer me to give you a few bits of advice. It's about your mother. A twisty subject, I know, especially as you are on the cusp of breaking free of this town and the crushing weight of your childhood. But please listen and take these things to heart. I'm going to save you a lot of regret.
Record her voice. It doesn't matter what she says -- hello or I'm going outside for a smoke or the quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog. (Remember when she taught you how to peck that phrase on her massive manual typewriter? The keys struck so hard, punctuation scarred the backs of her pages.) Make sure, though, that she says your name. Years from now you'll understand that no one says your name quite like your mom.
Use a tape recorder -- there's one on the portable boom box you carried with you to the foster home to play "Raining in Baltimore" and "Silent All These Years" on repeat. Go ahead and record over some of those mix tapes you made in junior high. You won't miss Jon Secada or TLC. There is much better music for you ahead.
If, between high school graduation, buying your first car, packing for college, burying your dog, and working at the local Sonic Drive-In, you can't find time to cajole her into speaking to the mic, it can wait. Wait until your freshman or sophomore year in college when she leaves a message on your answering machine, the grey one with the tiny micro-cassette that you will keep next to the 13-inch television in your dorm room. Maybe she'll say she was just calling to say hi, to see what's new. Maybe she'll say she loves you before hanging up. When you hear this message, pop out the cassette and throw it in a drawer. Protect it from direct light and heat -- you know how the fragile magnetic tape can swell and break, just like your relationship.
Whatever you do, keep it. Carry it from place to place. Twelve years from now, 1200 miles away, you'll go looking for it in every box of knickknacks and every tub of memorabilia you own. You will listen to hours of blank static hoping to catch a few notes of her. Don't let her voice become irretrievable. Its loss will strike your heart like the semi-colon key on a 1960s Smith Corona.
Keep all the letters. To bridge the distance and pass the time, she will write. Long, multi-entry, front-and-back letters will flow from her own impossibly small hand. She will tell you which cat is pregnant now and which bird has nested in the remains of her front steps. She will tell you her favorite neighbor -- Mr. Nelson, the one who let her fill up dozens of plastic jugs in her car during those years she lived in the trailer without running water -- has died. She will tell you she always knew you would leave, but she didn't know she wouldn't want you to go.
Read those letters. Read them over and over until the paper goes limp and the ink gets thin. Then stash them in a box somewhere, preferably stuffed hastily into their original envelopes bearing 33-cent stamps. If you don't, in nine years you will discover you have precious few reminders of her scratchy script when you need it most. In the closet of her bedroom, while looking for something else, you will find every single letter you wrote back to her. All of the drama and growing pains and loneliness you will experience during those first two years of college (remember: it gets better) will be catalogued there, tucked in a manila envelope for safe keeping and re-reading. The realization that she treasured them, and you threw away hers like old, stale newspapers, will slap you in the face. There won't be enough jugs in anyone's car to catch the tears.
Let her go. In the coming months, you will grapple with the idea of forbidding her from dropping you off at college. Although you're not sure why you feel so strongly right now, later it will make sense. You need a clean break. You need to start over in a new place, in a new city, taintless of any vestige of where you came from.
Letting go is well and good. Necessary, even. We are made so heavy by the things we drag with us, the sorrows and the memories. Do not feel bad about letting her see you off to college from the parking lot of someone else's apartment in your home town, and handing her a poem you wrote for her that isn't to be opened until after you leave. The one that ended with the line "my hands are too small to hold my dreams for you now."
Don't let yourself drown in regret of this decision to move on and live your life, even if it means not taking care of her as well as you'd like. This is what she wants for you -- to grow up, to live the life she didn't get to. In less than nine years, you'll be standing on a different curb in a different city, hugging her fiercely, while she tells you not to worry about her. Don't give it another thought, she will say, and wave at the back of your car as you drive away.
It will be the last time you see her.
It's okay to cry.
It is May 1998. Right now you are merely 17 but you've survived enough hardship to make you a bona fide adult, if that's how we're counting. Keep going. It will get worse before it gets better, but I promise it will get better. Some day you will soar.
In the meantime, I hope you'll suffer me to give you a few bits of advice. It's about your mother. A twisty subject, I know, especially as you are on the cusp of breaking free of this town and the crushing weight of your childhood. But please listen and take these things to heart. I'm going to save you a lot of regret.
Record her voice. It doesn't matter what she says -- hello or I'm going outside for a smoke or the quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog. (Remember when she taught you how to peck that phrase on her massive manual typewriter? The keys struck so hard, punctuation scarred the backs of her pages.) Make sure, though, that she says your name. Years from now you'll understand that no one says your name quite like your mom.
Use a tape recorder -- there's one on the portable boom box you carried with you to the foster home to play "Raining in Baltimore" and "Silent All These Years" on repeat. Go ahead and record over some of those mix tapes you made in junior high. You won't miss Jon Secada or TLC. There is much better music for you ahead.
If, between high school graduation, buying your first car, packing for college, burying your dog, and working at the local Sonic Drive-In, you can't find time to cajole her into speaking to the mic, it can wait. Wait until your freshman or sophomore year in college when she leaves a message on your answering machine, the grey one with the tiny micro-cassette that you will keep next to the 13-inch television in your dorm room. Maybe she'll say she was just calling to say hi, to see what's new. Maybe she'll say she loves you before hanging up. When you hear this message, pop out the cassette and throw it in a drawer. Protect it from direct light and heat -- you know how the fragile magnetic tape can swell and break, just like your relationship.
Whatever you do, keep it. Carry it from place to place. Twelve years from now, 1200 miles away, you'll go looking for it in every box of knickknacks and every tub of memorabilia you own. You will listen to hours of blank static hoping to catch a few notes of her. Don't let her voice become irretrievable. Its loss will strike your heart like the semi-colon key on a 1960s Smith Corona.
Keep all the letters. To bridge the distance and pass the time, she will write. Long, multi-entry, front-and-back letters will flow from her own impossibly small hand. She will tell you which cat is pregnant now and which bird has nested in the remains of her front steps. She will tell you her favorite neighbor -- Mr. Nelson, the one who let her fill up dozens of plastic jugs in her car during those years she lived in the trailer without running water -- has died. She will tell you she always knew you would leave, but she didn't know she wouldn't want you to go.
Read those letters. Read them over and over until the paper goes limp and the ink gets thin. Then stash them in a box somewhere, preferably stuffed hastily into their original envelopes bearing 33-cent stamps. If you don't, in nine years you will discover you have precious few reminders of her scratchy script when you need it most. In the closet of her bedroom, while looking for something else, you will find every single letter you wrote back to her. All of the drama and growing pains and loneliness you will experience during those first two years of college (remember: it gets better) will be catalogued there, tucked in a manila envelope for safe keeping and re-reading. The realization that she treasured them, and you threw away hers like old, stale newspapers, will slap you in the face. There won't be enough jugs in anyone's car to catch the tears.
Let her go. In the coming months, you will grapple with the idea of forbidding her from dropping you off at college. Although you're not sure why you feel so strongly right now, later it will make sense. You need a clean break. You need to start over in a new place, in a new city, taintless of any vestige of where you came from.
Letting go is well and good. Necessary, even. We are made so heavy by the things we drag with us, the sorrows and the memories. Do not feel bad about letting her see you off to college from the parking lot of someone else's apartment in your home town, and handing her a poem you wrote for her that isn't to be opened until after you leave. The one that ended with the line "my hands are too small to hold my dreams for you now."
Don't let yourself drown in regret of this decision to move on and live your life, even if it means not taking care of her as well as you'd like. This is what she wants for you -- to grow up, to live the life she didn't get to. In less than nine years, you'll be standing on a different curb in a different city, hugging her fiercely, while she tells you not to worry about her. Don't give it another thought, she will say, and wave at the back of your car as you drive away.
It will be the last time you see her.
It's okay to cry.
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