Yesterday I counted a year, a month and a day. I dropped the minutes and the breaths. I survived this great departure even though my heart was in shreds, enough to make me sick.
– No, it’s not the heart, Josée. It’s the esophagus, my doctor diagnosed.
– I have always been told that I have a big heart, it overflows…
Since he spread his wingsbit.ly/3YcA19M), I learned to curb my maternal ardor, to “let go”, as they say to good women, another counter-intuitive injunction. You have to be perfectly stoic, even in departures, even in hollow love, even in the deluge. And flood, there was.
My 6-foot-4 B has grown another foot since flying into an apartment last year. At just 19 years old, he gained confidence in adversity, moved a few times with his bags, and experienced homelessness as a victim of climate change since the floods of September 13th.
Five months and dusts later, Hugo has refitted his home last week in an apartment bordering on unsanitary, with the workers in the legs and months of building plaster as a souvenir. I was flabbergasted (I don’t lack organs) on the doorstep, my banana and chocolate cake in my hands contrasting with the half centimeter of gray matter on the stove, the mess everywhere, the discouragement in front of task. I was on the verge of tears.
“Okay, thank you mom. You can go. It’s going to be OK. We are three big boys, we will manage.
He chased me away gently with my cares, my heart on my sleeve and all my rigging. And they settled (with the cake). Freedom, stie!
“If you can see destroy your life’s work
And without saying a single word, get back to rebuilding,
Or suddenly lose the gain of a hundred games
Without a gesture and without a sigh”
I re-read Kipling. No doubt he has become a man, my son…
Alley University
He will have learned, things, for a year, a month and a day: not to arrange a room in the basement of a basin (former stream of HoMa), to take out insurance, to accept help from friends , patience, back pain on makeshift air mattresses that deflate at night, insomnia, no water in shower, broken oven, mitten washing and eating cold pizza. “It took me out of my comfort zone, mom. It took that,” he reassured me as he bought some bedding and a “body pillow” (an adult comforter) at IKEA this week.
In front of us, a three-year-old toddler was throwing a tantrum at his mother, already overworked by the youngest in the cart.
– Lucky you never gave me the bacon in public and I escaped positive parenthood! It seems that you no longer have to say “no” to children, you have to say “stop”. And don’t traumatize them by sending them to their room. I read that in Quebec Science…
– It’s scientific, too!
My B was laughing. I wasn’t perfect, but I did what I could (love, criss!), and he knows it. He understood for a year what childhood he had. He tells me, half-nostalgic, half-moved: “It won’t happen again…”
Today, I go to his school, that of a young adult. It is he who shows me to live, to bow before the heaviness of the time, not to ride on my high horse. More zen, more cool, his old soul is already ready to face this crazy century. Not me. I did everything to spare him the worst and yet it is through adversity that he dazzles me. The shrink was right: let him screw up, he’ll be proud afterwards. Resilience is a rough school.
If you can meet Triumph after Defeat
And to receive these two liars from the same front,
If you can keep your courage and your head
When everyone else loses them,
So Kings, Gods, Luck and Victory
Will forever be your submissive slaves
And, what is better than Kings and Glory,
You will be a man, my son
I recently read in The world (bit.ly/3KMtGPb) an investigation into the gap that separates the COVID generation – perceived as sacrificed – from its elders. We are in a “prefigurative” culture where “all men are immigrants entering a new era”, explained the anthropologist Margaret Mead before the appearance of the term Anthropocene. We are immigrants in front of “a new digital continent and new ethical shores”, in front of another relationship to gender, to work, to consent, to fluidity, to feminism. Immigrants facing a future of which we have dispossessed this generation.
Educate from a distance
For a year, a month and a day, I have been sending him a note almost every morning, videos from Sadhguru, vegan recipes from bosh.tvphilosophical quotes, personal finance advice (bit.ly/3y0vxbx), too many emojis, TikTok videos on the toxicity of candles (weak sound), photos of Lélé (our cat) to make him a bit bored.
To say that spring break has already been a long organizational sigh of work-family-leisure balance. Today, he is passionate about his job, has just returned from a ” shooting » and a « master class », Undertakes a thousand projects. I’m orbiting somewhere in his galaxy, probably to the lost items.
I persevere in distance education, even if I have not succeeded in transmitting my love of literature, my deep respect for our roots — I cried when I went to see the latest scenic documentary by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette and Emile Proulx-Cloutier, Not lost —, my banana cake recipe.
He shows me his cocktail creations. His last ? Sour love, based on gin, vermouth, lime, tonic, maple syrup and fresh mint. I find it very young to associate bitter with love, sour with sweet.
I texted him these words from Fernando Sabino:
“Of all, there remained three things:
The certainty that everything was
starting,
the certainty that it was necessary to continue,
the certainty that it would be interrupted
before being finished.
Make the interruption, a new path,
make a fall, a dance step,
scare, a staircase,
dream, a bridge,
of research…
an encounter. »
He replied with a TikTok video:
“If you spend your time chasing butterflies, they will fly away. But if you spend your time growing a pretty garden, the butterflies will come to you. And if they don’t come, you’ll always have a nice garden. »