Blank

On not saying much.

My son asked me today if I am happy.  We were on a long drive, which is when most important things get said out loud, eyes forward.  He was explaining the mechanics of his new mountain bike and describing a favourite track through the forest; I was driving and responding.  He said he thinks I’m not as happy as I used to be.  He said sometimes it feels like I’m just saying things and waiting for our conversations to be finished.  I reached over and held his hand.

We are both traversing new ground.  He is a boy moving into a grown-up body, experimenting with what a grown-up mind might feel like, finding the words to say grown-up things.  I’m in a phase of deconstruction.  Everything I lean on dissolves.  The sense of meaning I’ve extracted from motherhood, and actually from everything forever, has been exposed as a lovely, cosmetic filter I’ve applied to make life palatable.  I am 40 and my unconscious mind has decided it’s time to consolidate the suspicion that my life’s work, and everything everywhere, is utterly meaningless.  It’s quite the epiphany.  My quietness about it is new for all of us.

I didn’t appease him, which felt like the right thing; tasted like honesty.  I didn’t apologise for what must seem like distance or disconnection to him.  I didn’t switch into the high, soothing voice to express something dripping in comfort, which I think maybe he was trying to trigger in me; some familiar, optimistic motherliness.  He hoped I would switch on the golden glow of sentimentality, to restore the filter, which has softened all of our sharpest edges.  I see, given the gentleness he expressed his observations with, that he might also have been expecting to engage with the other high voiced woman, the one laced with hardness.  She would have switched on the fluorescent light of argumentative complaint about her own unmet expectations.  Aglow with fuzzy sentiment, or ablaze with acidic crankiness; both states just a pendulum swing apart, a slight shift of the seesaw from one to the other.  He’s comfortable with both versions of this woman, having met them each regularly.  Either one is a mother he knows what to do with.  Right now, I am neither.  Unable to embody either emotional state, it’s as if I have gotten off the ride entirely.  Without the filter of meaning colouring everything, there’s just blankness.

I said I’m figuring out that it might be OK not to be sparkly all the time. 

I didn’t say I am experiencing dissolution of parts of myself I didn’t even really know were there.  Nor that we are approaching the end of the way we were during his early years.  That the sense of togetherness, fundamental to our survival while we clung to a raft of shared meaning through the storm of early childhood, is changing.  I didn’t say that the tasks of adulthood had commenced for him, and he will carry on untangling himself from the things his mother has provided so far.  That we must let the raft disintegrate and stop clinging altogether.  I didn’t say I think my job might be to demonstrate, by awkward and quiet example, how to traverse the space between imagining how we want things to seem and accepting them as they really are. 

I didn’t say much, but he smiled toward the road and squeezed my hand, so I’m pretty sure he got it.