a little bit of an aside before i get into this. originally i think this one had a much more interesting opening, but that was eight days ago and it turns out that its not that easy to write when you have an incredibly clingy four month old and then you’re too burned out at the end of the day to do anything except make dinner and watch old episodes of jeopardy. but i have a few minutes to myself and really did want to get back into this, so ill cut to the chase with the bulletpoints: summer of 2022 i was diagnosed with autism and started going to therapy, summer of 2023 i became a parent, and 5 weeks ago i lost my mom.
last month would’ve been my mother’s 72nd birthday. i guess it still was.
the funny thing about it, which maybe isn’t really all that funny at all but i can’t think of a better word for it, is that through all of the pieces i’ve written here and all of the things i can think of that are worth sticking around for; i always said when things got their absolute worst in my brain that i could never just end things because it would upset my mother too much. and that’s what runs through your head when you get a phone call at 6:30 at night that your mom stopped breathing in the middle of the night and had to be resuscitated, and now she is on a ventilator and you just start driving to Florida without hesitation. 22 hours later you’re face to face with something that you can’t actually absorb as a real event, which you chalk up to sleep deprivation even though you know it isn’t but you need to tell yourself it is in order to get through the days in front of you.
its weird isn’t it? we’re all going to lose our parents someday, and we just… pretend we aren’t until it happens. or at least i know i did. even though she had been aging pretty rapidly the last year and a half or so, she didn’t have any sort of terminal diagnosis that i knew of. so i guess i always thought i’d have more time.
more time to get settled somewhere and convince her and my dad to move closer so we could help them with their doctors and apartment things.
more time for the mets to finally put it all together so we could talk about something positive during the baseball season.
more time to spend together.
more time for her to meet her granddaughter.
but, we don’t always get more time. this isn’t the seminal 2011 classic In Time featuring Justin Timberlake, Cillian Murphy, and Pete Campbell from Mad Men who definitely has a real name i could google but i’m in a little bit of a groove here. and that’s probably been a major takeaway i’ve picked up since i started this writing project; time is the most important thing that we get, and the biggest reason to stick around. now of course that doesn’t mean i will be cutting out all the superfluous editions of this newsletters about drawstring pants, getting a new car, or pretending you’re going to learn a new language. but it does mean that i am going to be back, and exploring some of the weightier things that have happened to me in the last two years.
in the interest of keeping this one kind of short, i’ll end things here. but if you’re still getting these emails and you’ve read this far; thanks for putting up with the hiatus and then this weird rambling. if you’re new here, hi. i can’t promise this is going to be weekly again, but i can promise that i am back.