Your Monthly Momecdote, Issue 14: June, 2025

This blog post was originally published in my June monthly newsletter. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.

These days I often become aware that the distance between what I want my son to be (a person without my qualities) and who he is (a person who shares many of my qualities) is closing. And occasionally, that realization hits me in a very irrational way. Like, why am I so upset to be looking at these pieces of myself, or bracing for something that looks and feels so perilously familiar? Which is not to be self-deprecating; I am, you know, generally fine. I'm artistic and curious and unafraid of my inner space (unless it proves inconvenient). I am imaginative and hard-working; I have been known to achieve an element of rizz. But these are the parts of myself I have learned to trust and refine over time, whereas what I'm seeing in its raw form (my son) are the things that, as an adult, I sometimes wish I didn't have—like, maybe something would be easier for me now, if I just hadn't been so [ ... ] back then.

The things I mean: my son is sensitive to the rejection of others; when someone doesn't want to play with him, that can visibly bother him for long periods of time. He's an only child, as I was for a long time, and prefers the company of adults to his peers, which means he's often hesitant to approach them at all. He can be reluctant to try new things in a new environment; he knows when he's being tested and is obviously worried he might fail. He is a remarkable artist for his age—no, really—but even being this little, barely developmentally able to hold a pencil, he still looks at what he's done (self-portrait if he had wheels like Wall-E! the beautiful jacaranda tree outside his bedroom window! him riding a seal while holding a balloon! me, holding his hand, while holding a kite!) and tells me it isn't good enough.

He occasionally has the energy of wanting to remain in the same inner space that, as I already mentioned, I eventually made a living on. But it was hard as a kid, to be the kind of person who didn't understand why other people didn't like or understand me for some underlying material, something fundamental to what I was. Every friendship that ended, every person I once knew still lives with me, my Taylor Swift-ian collection of little weighty ghosts. Which isn't even to say that kids don't like my son! As far as I know, he's perfectly happy with his friends, and certainly he has them. He's happy every day to go to school and learn new things. So I'm worrying about nothing, as is my way. Did I mention I have many flaws?

None of this is a problem, or if it is, it certainly isn't my son's problem. It's more like what I wanted for him was... happiness? That feels outsized to say. Of course I want him to be happy, and I do believe he is. But what I mean is that I wanted happiness to be always within reach for him, always easier than any alternative—maybe the quality I wanted for him is something closer to carefree. Literally without a care for anything painful, or fear of anything that might hurt. I thought childhood was the easy answer, that pressure necessarily came later, not even a blip on his springy little mind for now. I thought that everything wrong with me was something I'd been doing—something I could prevent if it happened again, if I just caught it early, in smaller form. Aren’t I such a cliche, the parent who wants better for their child, ironically at risk for starting the cycle over again for the very same reason it started. And then, naturally, I think: but he is so easy to love. Why is it so hard to love me?

This is the place for things I haven't reckoned with yet; part of the ongoing insanity of motherhood, the thing where at every moment you (or maybe just me?) look at yourself in a different way, like a slew of aerial footage. The weird collision of who you are and who you were and everything you hoped and wished for that is irrelevant, really, to the very real person standing in front of you, who doesn't need or want your imaginary hopes or fears. It's another confession, another strike in the ledger of my failures, that I caught myself getting frustrated, so inexplicably angry, because my son didn't want to do something I also wouldn't have done as a child—all because I regret it now; because it seems like everything could have been simpler if I had just been different than I am. God, can you believe this is the mind that has to pay taxes, to remember which groceries are already in the fridge?

I sat down to write without knowing what would come out and now here we are again, with unrelenting introspecting, just like all the critics say I do. Where to leave you? I don't know, I guess with the warning that some things really are genetic? That sometimes the worst of you might look better and sweeter in a softer light? Take what you want from me, he certainly has, I'm exhausted. Maybe this is all just fodder for some future retrospective; a portrait of the artist as a young man by the artist that was his very tired mother.