An open letter to my emancipating son
May 11, 2020
Dear Elliott,
You are now 29 years old, and we are in the middle of another plague. This time we are apart and sheltering with our mates, in good hands. Each day, without symptoms I tell myself that I have at least 2 weeks more to live. This puts a certain urgency in my sending you this e-mail with what is presently on my mind.
I am reading a paper about “termination” in psychoanalysis. What is being said about the analyst/patient relationship as the patient leaves or has already left can also be said about the process of your having left home and where you are now a decade later having transitioned to adulthood. The gist of what the author says that I’ll translate into what is happening in our relationship is this. As your parent, I need to be prepared to become unnecessary, de-idealized and cast-away. What is good about my parenting I hope is now already internalized and transcended or exceeded. What I once did for you that you were unable to do for yourself, you can now do alone and without me. Probably, you are even doing it better than I did or could have imagined at your age or ever.
This I see in your proficiency in your chosen field, your choice of a mate, your desire for intimacy, your instilled love of the mountains, the earth and animals. This I see in your valuing friendships and family relations and your fidelity to those you love over time. This I see in your relationship to money and your values that you are formulating about money and its use and limitations. This I see in how you love not only others but how you have come to care about and love yourself, ask for help when you need it and extend it when you see care is needed.
I often miss your proximity. I haven’t yet acquired a way to live out the place you have in my heart with you not only because of the plague that separates us but also within the organicity of your emancipation. I miss your moods and the way your expressions wash over your entire body. I miss your passionate and annoying persuasiveness, your wicked humor, that existential angst and acute insights into the physical and metaphysical mysteries of living. I ache with the missing of you sometimes and cry in Ted’s shoulder. He squashes me …or puts the weight of his body on top of mine like a weighted blanket so that I can be calmed with the raw truth of things.
Becoming obsolete is excruciatingly painful. Yet it is an indicator that you are doing your job in time’s unalterable course (towards death). What I am saying goodbye to is the life we shared during your childhood and not the structure that has been built through our dialogue rooted there now extended into our indeterminate futures.
Only love… your Mom
