April Fool's & New Year's

*In my previous post, I mentioned that I was going to start writing through some things. So, here I go. Please know that I'm not crafting creative nonfiction here. At the same time, I don't want to blather on about personal bullshit for no reason. I'm not writing to purge or to entertain but because--as a woman, writer, and mother--I feel invested in exploring human emotion, cause and effect, and the human capacity for reflection, growth, and change (in particular here, as it pertains to my family). Despite the delicate content, please feel free to comment as you will; I wouldn't be sharing if I weren't comfortable with a discussion or response. So...without further ado, a longish, unedited post:

Of the many things that people have told me to "just wait" for with my teenagers, the big "I hate you," was one that I knew was inevitable yet hoped would never really happen. For all the fights that Cody and I have had (now that he’s fifteen and knows it all), he’s never told me that he hated me. Until yesterday.

The day started normally. I made bacon, eggs, toast, coffee. All of this was warm on the table when the boys came up from their mancave to eat and sip and chat. Well, the chatting part is always something I hope for, yet rarely does this go well. So, since it was a sunny winter day after a cold stretch that kept us indoors for days, I asked the boys if they wanted to go sledding (no, let’s shoot pool). Because the poolhall wouldn't open ‘til 5, I asked the boys if they wanted to go work out and play b-ball at the JCC (no, let’s go bowling). I’m trying to get them to do something active, something that will get our blood moving, something free, and from there, a simple disagreement escalates—who knows how—and ends with me giving some lecture about trying to get out and live here in Utah and Cody saying, “Is that all?” His tone means he’s not waiting to be dismissed but rather he’s dismissing me, and I don’t care for it.

At this point, I want him out of my kitchen. His back is to me. I push him to the edge of the kitchen. I want him to take his smart mouth out of the kitchen (have I said I wanted him out of the kitchen?). Somewhere in here, he tells me that I’m lucky I’m a woman (the implication is that otherwise he’d hit me). That he hates me.

Fine. He’s not the first.

I’ve been hated before, to be sure. Still, in a few moments, it’s going to hurt. A lot. And I’m going to slink to the kitchen floor. And cry. A lot.

*****

It was the morning of April Fool’s Day, and Cody had slept at a friend’s the night before. Channer was sitting on the couch in our tiny cabin in Marquette, MI, the ice on the pond breaking open through the window behind him. Spring in the UP. Lovely. The beginning of all that’s green.

When my phone rings, I don’t know the number, and when I answer, I don’t know the voice. All I know is that the person on the other end, to whom I haven’t spoken in nearly 20 years, is telling me that my first love (Cody’s father) is dead. Dead.

These calls, no matter how many times they’ve come in my life, kick my ass every time. So unexpected, so sudden, so permanent. It hits me the same way “I hate you” in the kitchen hits me … delayed, dreamlike, swinging round and low and taking its time to reach my gut.

When it hits, I can see Channer, his face gone gray against all that soon-to-be green, watching his mother sob at 9am for what reason he cannot know. For a loss he cannot understand. For his older brother’s father, whom he’s never met.

*****

It’s been seven years since Cody’s seen his father, Jesse, who was just killed while driving drunk on a four-wheeler. How this hadn’t happened sooner is a mystery to me—considering all of his years of drinking and driving ATVs through the dense woods of Northern Wisconsin—but how it actually happened this morning, this night, this April Fool’s Day, is yet for me to know.

For now, all I know is that I have to go pick up my son, who is 14 years old, who is a bottler, who has every right to be angry already and no idea what to do with that anger, and I have no idea how to tell him this news.

When I pick him up, I take him to the nearest parking lot (his high school) and park. When I tell him that he’s lost his father, he says very little. He stares out the window. Says he was never there anyway, there’s really no difference. Can we go home?

But I know the difference. My chest is heavier than it's ever been, and--maybe for the first time ever--I really know what it means to have a child, someone for whom you'd take all pain. I know now that it’s a matter of time, a game of waiting for him to know the difference. I fear it’s going to take years. I fear it’s going to take a lot of hate. I fear that I'll never be able to take all of his quiet ache and fill myself with it, that I'll never be able to make it right.

*****