This Is Me, Writing

There are, indeed, certain people that I am just not going to vibe with. And I know this pretty early on because I have that witchy energy where I can literally feel the way the energy shifts when I lock eyes with someone for the first time. It is cellular. It is a rearrangement of something in the atmosphere that my body registers before my brain has even had the audacity to weigh in. And I used to ignore that energy, the red flags, the quiet seismic warnings, and because of that there have been a few times that I have been burned. Badly. In ways that took years to unknot. I’m not fucking around with that anymore. I’m too old to play that game of niceties. Oh, I can be nice. I will be nice. But I also have a dead child and because of the horror of that, I know life is too fucking precious to waste my time here on earth on bullshit. I will no longer grant you admission into the cathedral of who I actually am if you are not deserving of me. The deepest parts of my soul are not available to you. It will only be surface level shit. And I hate surface level shit with every fiber of my being. It is why, on most nights, I would rather be horizontal in my extraordinarily cozy bed, my dog’s warm and impossible weight pressed against my legs, either working on my book or completely annihilated by someone else’s. I am currently transported by Wildwood by Colin Meloy — illustrated by Carson Ellis, from the creative universe behind Coraline — and it is wrecking me in the most exquisite way imaginable. Because it is set in the PNW and the PNW is where I was a little girl who rode her bike through puddles and disappeared into forests so dense and green they felt like their own sovereign nation, who had parents that simply opened the door in the morning and trusted the world enough to let her go. Let her be. Let her run. That kind of childhood calcifies in your bones. It raised me — the wolves and the fairies and the things in the forest. It made me soft and it made me hard and it gave me guts and it gave me truth and it gave me the specific kind of freedom that nobody can ever take back once you’ve had it. I have been running wild ever since. I will be running wild when I die.

But last week I got an invite from another bereaved mom who doesn’t live in AZ, but who was going to be visiting. We both have dead kids. We are both ferociously, unapologetically passionate about our dead kids, which has led us to multiple calls, and I adore her with the specific intensity you reserve for people who already know the worst thing about you and don’t flinch. She invited me to dinner, which I was so excited about. Then she mentioned some other friends of hers who live here were going to come. They also have a dead child. Fair warning — this is not a dinner party you would want to partake in if you are not bereaved. There is no polite segue away from the dead kids. They are the entire point. They are the reason we are all sitting here. And the dinner started off fine. I choked my way through the small talk, that particular brand of conversational purgatory I have never once been able to endure gracefully. I sat quietly while the couples talked about things they had done together, their shared history moving around the table like something warm and private that I wasn’t meant to touch. I listened. I made sure to be lavishly, pointedly sweet to the server who forgot one of the salads — and someone at the table made absolutely certain she understood her transgression. I cannot handle that. The casual, unconscious cruelty of it. So I kept telling her it was completely fine, even though it wasn’t even my salad.

Partway through dinner, blondie started talking about her hair. I casually asked who her hairdresser was here in town. She blurted out a name and my jaw dropped — because it was my hairdresser. My hairdresser who is also my friend, who I have been seeing for eleven years, who has had her hands in my hair through so many versions of my life, through the struggle of it, through the slow and incomplete reconstruction of it. We were both elated. We both said small world and meant it with our whole chests. This is AZ. Hairdressers are everywhere. It was genuinely, cosmically wild. Later I complimented her on her nails and asked who she went to. She blurted out my nail salon. My same nail girl. The same hairdresser. The same nail girl. She kept asking how we had never met before, kept saying I looked so familiar, and I felt something in me begin, very cautiously, to consider the possibility of her.

And then I caught myself.

Because I know how to do my due diligence before I get in deep and hand over the keys to my heart. I have earned that knowledge the hard way, in the specific currency of women who have loved too freely and too fast and paid for it. So in the middle of this dinner I pretended to check in on my daughter and instead fired off a text to my hairdresser friend.

Hey. I’m at the most random dinner with your client. Before I go any further — is she MAGA by chance?

The response was immediate and unambiguous.

Um. Not only is she MAGA. Her daughter-in-law worked for Turning Point USA.

I set my phone face down on the table. I picked up my Diet Coke. I smiled at everyone.

Fuck. I knew it. Those witchy instincts I told you about? They extend, without exception, to MAGA people. And I want to be clear about something. I had no choice but to be at that dinner. I didn’t know who I was truly sitting across from until I was already halfway through it, already committed, already wedged between two bodies with nowhere to go. By the time my hairdresser’s text came through, the check was practically on its way. But since we are here and since I have the page and since I will not swallow this — let me be clear about what MAGA means to me. Because at this point in my life, if you are MAGA, this is not a political difference. It is a moral one. I am not interested in the “we just see things differently” framing. We do not just see things differently. You are openly, enthusiastically backing a man who has been found liable for sexual abuse in a court of law. A man who bragged, on tape, about grabbing women by the pussy. A man who has lied so prolifically and so shamelessly that the lies have become their own weather system, something we all just live inside of now. A man who has stolen. Who has been convicted — a legitimate, actual, court-certified felon — and who has used the presidency not as a public trust but as a personal ATM. A man who has torn families apart at the border, who has made the lives of LGBTQ+ people measurably, documentably more dangerous and more frightened. A man who performs poverty solidarity while becoming obscenely richer by the day. A man whose administration has gutted funding for childhood cancer research — childhood cancer — which is not a political issue, it is a children dying issue, and if you can look at that and still put on the hat, then we do not have a political disagreement. We have a chasm. And I am not building a bridge across it. Not for dinner. Not for anything.

I got through the remainder of the dinner on autopilot, my mouth producing the appropriate sounds while my interior life had already packed its bags and left the building. And then, out of nowhere, blondie was talking about her son — who was beautiful, genuinely beautiful, and whom I wish with everything I have that we didn’t share this particular terrible thing in common — and she said, with a bluntness that hit like a flat palm against bare skin: I know God put “Jackson” here to fulfill what he needed to do, and once he was done with that, he took him to be with him. He was only meant to be here for his nine years of life. Because that’s the way God wanted it.

My face flushed from the inside out. My tongue swelled in my mouth until it felt like a foreign object, something that no longer belonged to me, and with it went every word I had ever known. I contemplated standing up but I was wedged between two bodies with nowhere to go. So I sat there. In the particular suffocation of being trapped inside a moment you cannot exit. I breathed. I contemplated the architecture of my options. The check had just been paid. Dinner was, mercifully, over. It was either say nothing or go in deep. I said I had to get home for my daughter.

Between the MAGA and her unshakeable certainty that God had authored her son’s nine years and then recalled him like a library book — dinner could not have been over soon enough. Those are her beliefs. Her politics and her faith are the complete opposite of mine, and she is entirely entitled to them. And I am entirely entitled to never sit across a table from them again.

Those things bring her comfort. I understand that. I do. And I wonder — not in any quiet or peaceful way — I wonder when I am hovering over a toilet purging my pain because my body has no other language for it. I wonder on the nights I pace like a wounded animal, still looking for my son in rooms he has never been in, in corners of a house he never lived in, in the dark that just keeps being dark. I wonder when I wake up drenched in cold sweat because I could not find him in my dreams and losing him there, in the one place he should always be, is its own specific devastation. In those moments I wonder whether any of it would be easier if I believed. The whole Ronan is with God. He is held. He is golden. He is running through some celestial field without pain, without fear, without the poison that took him from me, and God — this enormous, benevolent, all-knowing God — is watching over him the way I could not. The way no mother could. And somewhere up in that vast and merciful sky they are both looking down at me, my boy and his God, and Ronan is telling him, that’s my mama, she’s okay, she’s going to be okay. And one day — one day — I will fold back into him and it will be as if none of it ever happened. As if the years without him were just a brief and terrible dream and we are finally, finally home.

I don’t know. And I’ve never wanted to know, because this is my truth and I am so ferociously, unapologetically done with people trying to make me feel ashamed of it. Done with the sideways looks and the gentle redirects and the implication that if I just opened my heart to the right kind of belief, I would hurt less. I wouldn’t hurt less. I would just be lying. And I have never once in my life been willing to lie about Ronan.

I do not believe in heaven or hell. I do not believe there is some vast celestial ledger where my sins are tallied and my kindnesses are weighed and the final sum determines where I spend eternity. I do not believe I have to perform goodness for an audience I cannot see. I live my life the way I do because I am kindness and I am love and because the way you move through the world and the way you treat the people in it is the only thing that is ever truly real. Not because someone is watching. Not because there is a reward waiting. But because my children have taught me — Ronan, who lived three days shy of his fourth birthday, and Liam and Quinn and Poppy, who are here and who are mine and who teach me every single day — that love without condition is the only thing worth anything at all. Not earned. Not performed. Just given. Freely. Completely. Without a single asterisk. And that has changed everything about the way I understand what it means to be a human being alive on this earth.

And the people who have hurt me the most — the ones who have left marks I am still tracing with my fingers years later — have not been the ones who believe in nothing. They have been the ones with the Bible verses in their profiles. The ones who post about grace and mercy on Sunday and then come for me on Monday with the most vicious, god awful things I have ever had directed at me. The ones who use their faith as a weapon and call it love. The ones who are supposed to be safe and are anything but. I have learned to read that particular warning sign from a very great distance.

I refuse to hand my son over to a God I don’t believe in just so that other people can feel better about his death. He is not up there somewhere, cared for by a stranger who decided his almost four years were sufficient, who looked down at a little boy who was my everything and said that’s enough, I need him now. No. Ronan is mine. He has always been mine. He will always be mine. He is my god and my stars and my moon and my sun and every dark and holy and savage thing in between. He is the reason I get up. He is the reason I burn. He is the reason I will never, not once, swallow my words to make someone else’s theology more comfortable at a dinner table.

I will follow him into the darkest of places. I will go wherever he goes. And he will hold my hand in the dark and he will tell me it’s okay and I will believe him — because he has never once lied to me. Unlike the story I’m supposed to accept where someone decided he was only here for a short time because they needed him more than I did.

But I did swallow my words that night. Had I had more time, had dinner not been over, I would have dug deeper. I would have pushed back. I would have looked her in the eye and told her no fucking way did I believe in any of that. I would have told her the truth — the whole uncomfortable, ungovernable, unsponsored truth — because that is what I do. That is who I am. I am the one who says the thing nobody else will say. I am the one who walks into the room where everyone is performing comfort and names what is actually happening. I have built my entire life on that. I have built it on Ronan. And I will not apologize for a single word of it.

Blondie said we should get together, but we left it open ended. Which feels correct because I’m almost positive she went home, looked up my social media accounts, and realized that loving me requires a passport to places most people don’t even know exist and aren’t sure they want to visit.

So we all know where this is headed: one highly charged dinner masquerading as a one night stand.

But I am also a processor. I don’t often detonate in real time. I drive home in the dark and I let it move through me and I sit with it and I find my way to the page. That night I just wanted the safety of my home. My dogs. My daughter. The people and creatures who will never hurt me the way the outside world does. And then I write.

And this is me, writing.