Looking For Something Lost

I lost my affinity for writing when I lost my mom. For two years, I toiled over and judged myself for having lost - it. I distracted myself from the loss of my mom and from the loss of my writing, all while aimlessly looking everywhere.

I summoned up some patience, waiting for the writing to return. But it didn’t return.

I looked before, behind and around me for how the writing and my mother were connected but couldn’t find a single thread to follow.

I tried to write. I tried to reunite myself with the love for it. But the “trying” was laborious and just projected an imposter. A stranger with a pen in her hand. I was like a kid writing an essay carefully choosing senseless words that sound “smart”. I was trying to prove something to someone, I just didn’t know who.

I couldn’t find myself on the small, impenetrable landscape of a 8 x 11 page. The vacuum left by the loss of my mom, by the one who’d held onto me the tightest was filled with a void which anchored itself behind my sternum and behind my voice. This muteness moved in, unabashed. And I ignored it.

I accepted that I wouldn’t be writing anymore. I replaced it with scattered distraction.

I took guitar lessons instead.

And…I read and read and read - the heart shattering, mouth watering, viscera shifting words of other, real writers. All while gracefully hosting my own platitudes.

Twenty five months after I lost my mom - and my writing, my youngest boy left for college. My sweet, tender, freckled faced, funny, energetic, vibrant young man. the morning he left for the road trip to Montana, standing in the doorway, I watched the car pull away from our cul de sac and I felt like my insides being pulled down the road with him until the anchor behind my sternum had no choice but to dislodge, moving into my heart and out of my throat.

The biology that tethers us to our babies became palpable and undeniable. I felt it. The physical separation of it. I spent the next few days with a grief that surprised me. I had to let him go. I had to let him go. I had to let her go.

I had to let them both go.

Now, I feel like I want to write again. I think it’s back. I know it’s back and it all happened when I was looking elsewhere.