Always put on your oxygen mask…
I was a goddamn inspiration tonight. There was music playing in the kitchen, our bowls edged with the leftover remnants of eaten chili. That powdered red dust turned liquid making bathtub lines on the inside of clay. Something by Billie Holiday was playing echoing around the old one-inch hexagon tiles and wide plank wood walls. Or maybe Josephine Baker.
Seventeen was doing dishes. It was his night. Fifteen and a half stood at the edge of the kitchen watching, listening, butting in when he felt particularly impassioned. Nine sword-battled Fifteen and a half for a little while then got bored, gave up, and went into the living room. So it was just them and me, the original two and their mama.
I had them young. They were babies at the same time, Irish twins, both in diapers, both entirely dependent on my body to keep them alive. They both had rubber band wrists and hair that looked like a cross between an old man and a stoner. I could see the pale blue rivers of their veins through translucent skin as they fell asleep. One laid plopped on my chest, latched on and sucking now and then when a dream would wake him. The other lying next to me in footie pjs.
I sang them special songs when they went to sleep, and we had all our rituals, all those millions of little secrets that belong to a mother in love with her children and the children in love with her. I was their entire universe for just a little while. No wonder it’s so hard to picture what it will be like in a year when I walk by an empty bedroom, David Bowie on the wall, the guitar packed up and long gone on the road trip to wherever he will live next. The bed will strangely be made, his landry non-existent. There is a day coming when I will miss the mess they are now.
They feel it, too. Both of them, but particularly the oldest because he will be the first one to put on his life vest and jump out of the raft. All of us will watch him sputter and flail and I will hold my breath until I know he’s caught his. This is the problem with being a mother in love: I have always been one to put on their oxygen mask before my own. It seemed only appropriate. If I go down, I go down loving them as my last act.
My heart melted open for them with the music and the clanking of dishes and the nervous and holy energy that swirls in the room where we eat our supper and tell most of the day’s secrets. Because my thin-skinned babies aren’t babies anymore. Six months is now Fifteen and a half. Two is now Seventeen going on Eighteen. Even so, there is still a sense that they need me to feed them, to tell them that life has something beautiful and nourishing for them, that the monsters aren’t real and that everything is going to work out alright.
But I love them too much to lie. So tonight I told them that they are going to die, that we are all going to die. It’s on my mind a little more these days because next month I will be 40, at least halfway baked. If I live as long as my dad, I have fifteen years left on this earth, fourteen good ones. I told them that life is too short to worry about not getting into NYU or Julliard or second-guessing if they are good enough, worthy enough of the dreams that keep them up at night. I told them “Your life is going to end. So while you’re here, you might as well live it. Live it all. Live it down to the dregs. Chase down every wild and harrowing dream. If it dies while you’re holding it, let it. Honor it. Mourn it. Then chase down the next dream and the next, until you die.” I told them the monsters are real, but they aren’t new, and there are people across history who remind us that the monsters don’t get the last word. Love does. Sacrifice does. Kindness does. Especially if you start with yourself, then move out in concentric circles.
I told them that I had known them since they were cell clumps and so I think that means they can trust me. “I’ve been watching you your whole life. I have always known the world will open its arms to you. I can’t wait for the world to meet you. It will be the one good thing about sharing you, about watching you walk out that door.”
Seventeen got quiet and realized he didn’t have any more arguments. Fifteen and a half followed me upstairs, pretending he needed to check something in his room but really, walked me to my door at the opposite end of the hallway. “Mom,” he said, his lanky, teenage man-arms stretched out to me, “Thank you for the things you said. I love you.” I held him for a few seconds longer than normal and told him, “you’re gonna be great.”
Eighteen years ago I got pregnant, dropped out of college, quit my pursuits and surrendered up my body and every dream to their open, hungry mouths. They drank me, gulp by gulp, they took my breath into their lungs. They still do.
