Letter 15 – Being a Parent is Heartbreaking

 

Dear Garrett,

When you were very young, I used to think to myself, how heartbreaking this is. To be a mother is so heartbreaking. I don’t know if other mothers felt this way, but I did for you. I saw such vulnerability in you. I wanted to protect you from the world. My heart broke for you all the time, as I watched you experience this life. So open. So brave. And yet, so very vulnerable. Different from what I’ve experienced with other children.

I thought it was because they weren’t mine. But, when Genevieve was born, I didn’t have the same feeling. I love her, entirely, and would protect her with my life, but I didn’t experience the same sense of heartbreak that I did with you. A soft soul, my counselor says. Someone who is especially sensitive to the world. That was you. Sensitive to the world, but brave. Not afraid to be who you were, even though I know it hurt sometimes, and it was hard. You sat with the people you liked, you made friends with the people you wanted to. Such an amalgam of friends you collected. I am proud of you. I am proud of you for being brave enough to be who you were, and to like who you liked, and to let yourself be exposed to cultures and people you had no prior experience of.

Some of your friends, were not great. If I could have steered you away from them with some foresighted knowledge I would have. But the one thing that everyone you befriended had in common was that they were gentle beings. Like you. Some of them became terrible drug users. And some of them didn’t. In my mind, there wasn’t any one of them that I hated for who they were. It was for what they did, and what you did when you were with them.

There was one boy, Liam, who I liked very much. If I had known what it was like when you were with him, I would have never let you go. And it was too long before I began to understand. Too much exposure to things I would never have wanted you to know of. Too much of too many things before you were ready. Things I wouldn’t have wanted you to ever be ready for. But you were his friend. I’m glad you were his friend, and I also wish you’d never known him.