Letter to my Son
Son,
Your due date passed in silence. I packed your clothes into two trash bags, the beginning of what would’ve been your first year, and placed them on the halfway point on the stairs. Carefully curated onesies, sweatpants, and sweaters combined with clothes and toys your sister has outgrown. Two weeks later I drove them to Goodwill.
I’ve gained 50lbs and can’t shake it. My midsection is doughy and most of my jeans can’t be buttoned. I’ve researched workout plans from pilates to traditional weight training, meal planning and new ways to eat healthy. Each one promising to change me back to who I used to be. I’m reading Atomic Habits and engineering my one percent change. I’m propelled forward into the new year with a well-designed excel spreadsheet and digital planner I bought the year before. My hands are manicured and I’m enjoying how the world looks through my new pair of glasses. Your sister has convinced me to sleep with her every night, my right hand over her heart, the same way we used to sleep together when she was a baby. It’s how I imagine it would’ve been with you.
So much is unknown about the relationship between a mother and her children. Popular science ostensibly claims cells from the baby are passed through the placenta and remain in her bloodstream, pancreas, and heart long after the baby is born. For decades they linger in a kind of equivocal stasis to eventually be reabsorbed. This microchimerism is not only an echo of what was once a part of the mother, but the child also shares cells from the mother and older siblings with a similar lifespan. Carl Sagan once said, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” In your absence I’ve done what I could to find you, ignoring the stillness in my body you left behind, cremated your remains, carry a small silver imprint of your right foot, gave you a name, but nothing is more profoundly comforting than knowing on a biological level you haven’t left me and won’t for the foreseeable future. You’ve gone back to star-stuff, a small part of an unknowable and expansive universe, but some part of your fragility lives on within me.
Your father asks me sometimes if I’m feeling ok. The truth is I’m not and never will be, but I tell him I am. He accepts my answer. I have nothing left to say to him that hasn’t been said and misunderstood. There are no words to describe the visceral love I have for you and how deeply it pains me I’ll never hear your voice, breathe in your scent as I hold you, or know what kind of person you will become. I promise to do my best to keep living, no matter how absurd it feels, no matter how paralyzed with grief I feel over not having you. Your sister reminds me I’m still a mother and very much loved and needed. Your father reminds me I’m more than that, even if the world went cold when I lost you.
