Letters to the Boy

When I Grow Up

So I am writing you as your mother. Perhaps now I am an adult since I have children...a teenage one, to boot. But you know how they ask you all the time what you want to be when you grow up? It's a sham this growing up. I have realized now that there is no real age to grow up and that in the realist of realities I have just now seen that although I possess this grown up spot, I haven't had to truly grow up yet. Yet.

Yet. This word hangs over me like a guillotine. I can feel the breeze on my exposed neck and my hands are firmly locked in place. I just can't hear the crowd or sense the movement of my executioner. Death. Death of my youth. Death of my adult. I mean the second one literally. And now, this just got real.

I have so far been imparting pearls of wisdom. This is no pearl. This is that ugly angler fish and we, my dear child, are now just seeing the teeth around us, behind us. We are too far in to escape. So, death.

Today I realized I wish so badly that you could have met your grandfather when he was my age. And then I thought what if I met him when he was my age...and I was my age now? How amazing would that be to see how I was formed, shaped by someone I was so close to. But you get him in another form, his evolved version. Pokigramps. Pokipa? And honestly, no thought has scared me into adulthood more. More than realizing that my dad is someone different for you than he was for me and that given the recent news I am trying my hardest to smile around for you, I am going to lose my adult shield and have to take the blows myself. I don't want to catch them all. None except one at the moment. And he is fading now. Not quickly yet, but I never really faced this inevitability until recently. You will have to do so one day. Losing a grandparent is different than losing a parent, obviously, or I will extend that to losing the one who raised you (whatever relation) is different to losing people involved in your life. But. But you will realize then that now all those things you used to call them for, well you are now responsible for picking up that call and answering. I will need to know how to do all these things. I will have to do them. Or not. I will face those consequences alone. Without my adult. And it hurts. So bad. And that sting is here just at the realization that this is inevitably going to happen in the future. Perhaps even the near future. I haven't even been given a full prognosis and I am hurting. So bad. He isn't going to able to shield me. From myself. From them. From you, even. He taught me so much and I just wish he did the same for you. Only you know what he truly taught you, and still yet you may not realize the full extent of what he did. I am just now, after knowing him my whole life realizing some of the things he taught me. There is yet more to come I am sure.

Anyway, people always ask when do you truly grow up. I feel I have learned one answer to that question today. When you lose your adult, and you have to step into this new day, hour, minute without them. I may have realized this but I haven't yet began to think of that minute I will be forced into that reality. For now, I am your adult and I will remain so as long as I am here. But one day our roles will change and I will be realizing something much more horrid than this growing up and growing old thing. Adult. Has nothing on what comes after. I think, though, we should leave that discussion alone. I am not ready for that today. Today I am just reflecting on the letters to the girl. Letters not written on paper or device. Letters written on summer nights, in long car rides with the windows down, in sneaky looks behind mom's back while bending the rules, on all the hard lessons I was taught without being told a single word. Ironic, isn't it that when I finally realize how I learn all my lessons there wasn't really one single letter involved. Yet here I leave you many (to this point 770 words worth of letters). I hope that I can at least leave you with this sinking feeling that you are about to be blindsided and sucker punched. That all those little times, stolen moments, are going to replay until you can't even see through the tears to watch memories. That I would have made you feel as unadult as I am currently feeling because all I want to do is crawl into his lap and bury my face in his ugly plaid shirt and have him tell me: cry it out, get it out of your system. Those words, that advice to the girl is the worst thing I could hear! He would sit and watch me cry until I let out every last tear and then dust me off and tell me to go do what I need to with those tears out of the way.

You don't have to grow up yet. You will rush to. You will long to. And then it will hit you: what it truly, actually means to grow up. And my dear, this shield won't be there. But i believe you will be a beautifully strong shield in your own right by that time. You will be the adultest adult of them all. And I will have left you this, of course. And you will have these words to remember and roll your eyes at because it seems that's all you do now. I too, once upon a time, used to roll my eyes at my shield for being so thick . I know the feeling of standing (we may even say sometimes hiding but perhaps I don't need to admit that at the moment as I'm pretty exposed right now) behind that beautifully strong shield. It's ok though. It's ok that you roll your eyes and sigh at perceived ridiculousness because I had such a shield and because behind this shield I know that you feel safe, and loved and secure enough to roll your eyes and pretend that this shield isn't here and that it will be there whenever you need in the future. Just know, dear shielded, that when you realize that this mighty shield shielding you now from adulthood was actually a little lame plank but beautiful in its own right, I know how you feel. And I love you the more for it. And I will expect you, in that moment, to be the adult. Even if you don't want to. There really isn't a choice.