Smithereens

I fell off the cliff.

I keep trying to find a way into this shattered narrative.

So that you stay with me and don’t just roll your eyes and say “This is too confusing.” And maybe some of you will find resonance, connection and company.

Because it’s still happening; and because more heart and brain-breaking things happen every day.

Because it is so terrifically, distractingly and breathtakingly painful, any sense of linearity or chronology of the story, has been blown to smithereens.

So. I’m going to grab a couple of these smashed, deracinated splinters and slivers,

of being a mother to this gorgeous person, or formerly beautiful and present person.

( If a loving, light-filled being unceremoniously amputates nearly all of the relationship, are they still, you know, awesome and attractive? Or…are they…something else?)

One working title is: “Sith Lords are real and they have legal rights.”

I’m grateful to Chanel Miller and Daniel Nayeri and their revivifying and life-enhancing books (“Know My Name” & “Everything Sad is Untrue” respectively.) These texts are both friends and instruction manuals on how to recount pain and heartbreak without spewing vitriol and spattering the audience in sick. And, somehow, these dear ones-the books and the authors- find beauty, humor and transcendence in the dark and/or dusty corners of the unfolding, heart rending events. ( Well, I guess beauty and humor equal transcendence. AHA!)

I’m grateful to Shane McCrae for his incandescent book, “Pulling the Chariot of the Sun” and its stitched together narrative. This book gave me the courage to start picking up the smithereens and telling you about them. Thank you for naming, albeit soul-crushing, what happened to you correctly.

It is not that your parent was alienated from you.

When your grandparents unlawfully and secretly took you, ran away and convinced you that your parent you are separated from is bad is not “parent alienation.”

No.

That is kidnapping and brainwashing.

When I read your book, I felt seen.

More mooning about these and other books as this cliff-falling and smithereens story unfolds.

Until my son was 15, there were some harrowing and devastating and terrifying times dealing with his other parent. But up until he was 15, my son and I navigated the storms together. And we got really good and finding the joy when some awful things were happening.

Like when my son was 4 years old and over the course of 10 months, when he went to his father’s house every other weekend, there was an angry 14 year old who beat my beautiful baby up. And when he asked his father to have a separate room from the 14 year old abuser, his father said he had to share the room. And the bully, like my son’s father, swore the 4 year old to secrecy.

And when it finally came to light that my son was being physically abused at his dad’s, my son and I worked it out and talked and hugged and found strategies to heal.

More on that later.

Now, though, I don’t know what my son is thinking. Literally. I don’t know what is going through his mind because he won’t answer my calls. And his father has co-opted his phone. So now, his FATHER texts me as if he is my son. Therefore, I don’t know what my son is thinking.

And while some parts of the “being completely cut off from my son” were gradual, the beginning moment, when he was a month away from turning 15, and we were discussing which high school he was going to go to, and it was two days into lock down in our coastal, fairly left-leaning city in the US, felt like I suddenly fell off a 25 foot cliff.

One minute my son and I were discussing the pros and cons of his two first choice schools, we were going on walks and calling different basketball coaches to discuss the programs, and I let my son talk and reason and I listened and reflected what I heard.

Then he made the decision to go to the school with the awesome and rigorous academic program and the basketball coach that was really excited to work with him. And he called his father to tell him the good news about his choice.

His father interrupted him and snapped at him when my son started talking.

His father demanded that they talk IN PERSON about this. ( I suggested FaceTime, but that was dismissed like Trump dismissing the 2020 election results as “fake news.”)

My son went down to talk to his father.

And suddenly, my son was gone. He was part of a cult.

Thank you patriarchy!

I fell and tumbled and fell and tumbled down down down the cliff.

I looked to see if my son, who had been standing right next to me up top, would offer help.

But he had disappeared.

And the bottom of the cliff was a much different landscape then the one up top.

Not to mention, I was totally alone.

My favorite family member had been kidnapped.

I found out later, the brainwashing had begun long ago.

The thing about miserable narcissists and Sith Lords(same difference, obvi), they know how to play the long game.