Lock and load
I was reading a NYT article about a film about an adopted son called “I’m Glad My Mother Is Alive” and of course, like any adopted parent, I read with hesitation as it described the son’s turmoil and anger over having been given up for adoption. Yes I cannot know the future or for that matter Tin and how he will be with himself and his situation. He has a lot to digest when he comes into awareness that he is our child now, the son of older white lesbians in New Orleans. For better or for worse.
But what also made me catch my breath was the final quote by Lao Tse that you could be good your whole life and then have a moment of madness. Funny how being here in San Francisco for such an extended period of time makes me remember however awkwardly that I had another life at one time or rather several lives here, the one where I arrived in 1989 newly married to my second husband and was going to start anew. The one where I met my third husband. The one where I returned with same from a stint in New Orleans and endured panic attacks over having left my own journey to follow his – the realization that I was marching to my grave unauthentic as I woke from this panic in Marin one day as I looked out over the lush yard that is caused by having 30% more rain on the backside of Mt. Tam.
Yes, I had my moment of madness, where I undid all that I had done and unraveled a life so intricately woven around my own self-deception that I could forgo my destiny, that I could live in someone else’s dream. So when that one day arrives when Tin perhaps rejects that I took as crooked a journey to become his mother that he took to become my son, maybe we’ll meet right where we are, who we are, and be.
And that will be that.