The cracks in my armor...

Graduation season reminds me of those connections my boys have not made.

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This newsletter rests at the intersection of the unserious ramblings of a woman full of buttered rice and dad jokes and the somewhat sophisticated stories and essays of someone who knows just enough “smart” words to sound super intelligent and insightful.

What will today’s newsletter be? Hmm…

I slipped the other day. Not literally. Not this tumble down, trip over my knee, kiss the ground with my palm to break my fall, slip.

It was the crack in this armor I have built for myself over the years that tells the world that I don’t care about things like prom, traveling sports teams, graduation, and parties for my kids.

I am supposed to be that “I am not going to mourn the life I dreamt for my kids and love them as they are” kind of parent.

Shit, I wasn’t that last week. Or the week before.

And right now.

I am feeling it. My heart twists up with every graduation pic and video showing wide smiles crossing the stage in oversized gowns, families hootin’ and hollerin’ when their teen’s name is called. I am thinking about how my children have never been invited to parties and won’t attend prom. Aidan is about to be 18 this upcoming March. He hasn’t had a friend. And his brother hasn’t had one either. They played no sports. No extracurriculars. Not one club between the two of them.

I won’t get those school dance pics. And part of me is sad about this. Another part is confused because I didn’t even like prom or any other school dance. Parties weren’t my thing, but I did play a sport.

I don’t want to feel what I am feeling right now. My kids are who they are. This is what their lives look like at this moment. In my head, I know what I should be feeling and my damn heart just out here actin’ a fool. I am emotional. I am a wreck.

And I am upset with myself for even traveling down this fuckin’ hole.

What am I even doing here?

I mentioned this was armor I wore. That whole unbothered vibe when it came to major milestone events within our children’s lives. And that is because it was. I hadn’t figured out how to not let societal norms and traditions get to me.

And damn I thought I did.

Fooled my damn self.

Even if I don’t quite understand them, or like the traditions, they were still part of my everyday life growing up and many of them involved my mom, or grandparents. Being connected in our culture in that way does mean something. I won’t deny that and perhaps that is what it is that I am missing about not having experienced these things? I really don’t have a damn answer. I am just…one more damn graduation picture or conversation about registering for college classes away from flooding this room with my tears.

I will say this, I learned some time ago that having big, complicated feelings was okay. The human in me has plenty. I am grateful that I remember to allow myself to push through difficult situations. I gotta feel what I gotta feel. If I would have shoved this down…

I wouldn’t have been better off for it.

As much as it hurts to feel it. I have to feel it. I have to know why I do allow this to get to me. How does prom make me cry, when it has never made me cry? Why am I worried about sports? Right now?

I do know that I want my boys to have friends. The love of a good companion is a beautiful and necessary thing for a species that is so interconnected with one another. We literally thrive on being in constant contact with one another. Not being all up under each other. Not allowing each other to breathe. But our mental, physical, and emotional health is wrapped in our connection with others. The way those pieces break apart when we are isolated, lonely, and removed from society.

So, yeah…I long for my boys to have those connections with people outside of their parents. And those strong feelings get wrapped in other things, tangled up and mixed in. Like prom. Or sports. Graduation. Marriage. Grandchildren.

It’s a whole thing.

And I am not managing it well. Think at the heart of it all is that I am worried about their connections to society and other people when I am gone. Those momentous occasions and events remind me of those undeveloped connections.

I begin to wonder if this was what the armor was for. Not this front that I present to the world that tells them I don’t care about my kids being the next high school football star like their daddy, but this cocoon that kept me protected from facing what I was trying to not face:

a world in which I no longer draw the same air they do.