there’s a lot of things that you won’t understand about me as you’re growing up. like why i never type with capitals, my love of starbucks and my need to make sarcastic jokes in order to lighten the mood, even when the mood doesn’t require lightening. but the goal of these monthly letters to you is to help you to understand who i am as a person, not just as your mother. i know, it’s almost a dirty word.
this month was an important one – the first important one, i should say – because this is the month that you came to exist. what follows is how you came to be you, because everything leading up to this point and forward will have an effect on who you are, i think. not just your mannerisms, or your eye colour, but also in how you view the world and your place in it. here’s how we made you (keep reading, i’m not really going to go into gross details, like it seems)…
your daddy and i were together for 2 years, 10 months and 20 days before we split up. why isn’t really important, except to say that we both needed to do some growing and we had been growing apart and stifling each other’s development for a while. we had both lost site of what we found important and exciting about the other person – left with the view of only what we wished would change. when you’re at this point in a relationship, it’s almost too far to ever go back.
it took us about seven months before we could be friends again, and then, quickly, we went back to being best friends. we started off spending a few hours a week together, which quickly changed to most days as daddy and i were both taking some time off of working. why?
we were both trying to figure out where we wanted to go, and had spent the past few years ending up exactly where we didn’t want to be, only to go looking again and end up in the same place, with a different company name and pay rate attached. daddy and i are both overworkers. we move into positions, make ourselves invaluable and then feel shorted when we’re not compensated and when we’re expected to be and do everything that we’ve spent our time there learning to. this doesn’t lead to a lot of happiness, monkey. it does lead to a lot of frustration.
anyways, i went back to work in june and daddy started working this month for a company that he sees himself wanting to be with for a long time. he’s inspired by the work that he’s doing, and that can only be a good thing, regardless of what you’re getting paid. if you love your work, you never have to call it a job; it’s a life.
in july, uncle nick moved to china to go to school and grandma nancy asked me if i’d like to move in. i’d been living with grandpa jim, helping him to pay some bills and saving some money myself, but i had been spending the majority of my days and nights when not at work with daddy. i was really only going home for short time periods, to visit grandpa jim and to change and shower for work.
flash forward a couple of months…and daddy and i were More Than Friends. but Not Together. when we had been Together, hallowe’en was daddy and my anniversary. and leading up to this one, i joked about whether we should celebrate it since we were More Than Friends, but Not Together. and i like to get and give presents. we decided against it, but daddy gave me a chocolate bar (who says romance is dead?) and i think we shared it after smoking too much pot (i’ll never lie to you), while watching some movies.
and then…the evil spirits decided to help us out with what we didn’t even realize we wanted so much, and created you. yes, that’s right, you were conceived (ugh, i know) on hallowe’en. i think this is something that i’ll use enough times during your teens to make you question my sanity. don’t worry, you’ll get plenty of other opportunities for that, too.
little did i know that you were even there, never mind how much you would change the next nine months of my life so drastically. or how much i would come to love you, as soon as i did know you were there.
love,
mummy
