The Apostate's Diary: Sunday, March 15, 2005

My dearest MD:

Last night I had a conversation with my son, BNO that made me feel so close to him, so very able to understand him and to be understood by him, that I felt transformed. We have had many tender and intimate talks, in which he has told me about his longings and desires, but I have never before seen so much of myself in this child, never before felt as though we were indeed of one spiritual fabric, one heart. Never before have I had the sense that my own child was not only OF me but WITH me, not just an offspring, but a soulmate. And the comfort of this conversation, the consolation it gave me, was a healing balm that soothed the ragged, jagged-edged standard that my heart and my spirit have been. My heart has flown like a white flag, a standard of defeat and despair, in face of the distance between us, my sense of having failed him, of having lost him, of all the terrible small and large mistakes I have made, and all the battles I have lost while trying to hold onto him, my beautiful, sensitive, loving son. I have held it up and out there, in the line of fire, as it were, from his father, his stepmother, and the world that condemns women like me.

My dearest, dearest boy, who so often seems to live so far away, to be utterly inaccessible and unknowable, opened his heart to me. What wonders children of this age are—they are wonderful at all ages, but at 13, 14, they are so honest, so frank, so idealistic, so trusting, so tender-hearted, even though they are also old enough to be duplicitous, closed, cynical, and to think to themselves that they should begin to harden against the world. I think it’s their decision to remain open, in spite of their awareness of the hurts in the world, that makes them such delicate and wondrous creatures. They are small dolphins, just grown gazelles, youthful lions still discovering the sleekness of their bodies, the ease with which they move through the world. They sense their power, but haven’t mastered it yet. They’ve had setbacks, but they haven’t given up. They want everything and still hope to realize their dreams. Adolescents are so often misunderstood, maligned, disliked, perhaps because we older folks remember how miserable and uncomfortable we were at that stage, and disown ourselves in them. But we ought to remember how beautiful we were when we were their age.

What was he talking about, then, you ask? What was it that made me feel so in tune with him, so very comforted to know that, in spite of the great divide, the divorce, his father’s narrowness and his stepmother’s jealousy, that I had somehow won some ground, forged a connection with a son over whom I have so little control, so little influence? He was telling me that he felt different from most of his peers, and that what he longed for most of all was to meet his true love, the girl who would understand him and know him and love him best of all. He said that he had just broken up with his latest “girlfriend” (whose name, eerily or sensibly enough, is Kim), and had realized that none of the girls he had known so far was quite what he was looking for. None of them was smart enough, or sensitive enough, or imaginative, or musical enough. You know what he meant.

Of course he is very inexperienced and doesn’t really know what it means to have a girlfriend. I doubt if he’s even kissed a girl yet. But he thinks about these things a lot, as I imagine many boys and girls his age do (I did). One could say that he’s compensating for something else in his life, some thing he is lacking, self-esteem, a sense of purpose, a drive, an ambition, a hobby. Give him something useful to think about, get his mind off such silly dreams, such fripperies, one might say. Or one could see that he is developing according to his own nature, and that he is just coming into his sex, and that his body may be growing—as it always has—very fast, and that it is spring, and he is an animal like the other creatures he loves on the planet. One might add that he, my thoughtful, idealistic son, often says that he likes animals better than humans, because animals don’t hurt the planet. He is very angry about what people’s chemicals and pollutions do to the waters and the creatures who can’t defend themselves against us. I love him for this.

I told him that one had to kiss a lot of frogs before finding the princess. He liked that. The saying seemed kind of stupid and trite to me, but I remember thinking it very profound. I also told him about a poem I used to sing to him when he was a little boy, called “The Song of the Wandering Angus.” It’s by Yeats, of course, and I was glad to be able to send it to him…by email, just before I sent you the poem by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. It was sending the poem to BNO than made me think of sending that one, about spring and blossoming and transcendence and sex, to you.